Trip to Durango, Colorado

Anyone who knows Jill is probably well aware that one of her greatest passions in life is to travel. Short road trips are just barely enough to quench the travel bug between what she calls a "real trip". So, as we're sitting at Jill's parents house on Christmas day, she mentions to her dad (Kent) that we were thinking about a short road trip somewhere as we both had about 11 days off of work. The next thing I know, Jill and Kent have started brainstorming a trip to Durango, CO to ride the Durango and Silverton train. This was probably Jill's fifth trip to Durango, as the Silver family loves to plan their trips around trains and train shows. I had rode on this train once in my youth on a trip with my
Order of the Arrow group, however I really didn't remember that trip too much. so, on the morning of December 27th, 2008, we picked up Jill's parents and started out on the road. As it had been snowing quite a bit over the Christmas holiday, the road conditions worsened the closer we got to our destination, so the drive took quite a bit longer than it normally would have. As we decended into Durango, the tempature gauge on our Jeep continued to decline until it bottomed out at about -3 degrees. I really didn't think it would register anything below zero and was a bit surprised to see it continue to fall. On Sunday we rode the train, although because of the weather conditions and there being too much ice on the rails, the train didn't quite make it to it's planned destination of Cascase Springs and instead stopped at Tacoma before heading back down the mountain. We spent the 2nd night in Moab and the next morning we wandered through Arches National Park for a while before heading home. Here's a slide show of some of the pictures from that trip.