Wagon no?

Okay - so the covered wagon may not have been my BEST choice, but with 21 reservations and only one slight oops, I think I'm batting pretty well. And the wagons weren't awful, because I DID remember to bring insect repellent wipes, and we meant to get up early anyway so it didn't really matter that we were freezing, and who needs a shower before you spend the day in Bodie, anyway? So yeah. And they DID have butterflies- tiger swallowtails and California sisters - and Stellar jays. And John pitched some horseshoes, and I got a HoJo bucket of pine cones, and they filled our water bottles with ice and water for us and we were off to the relic that is Bodie by 8:30 this morning.

We spent from nine to about two-thirty wandering Bodie, peering in windows, taking pictures, taking a tour of the stamp mill. Lots of rusty old shit to photograph (John's a sucker for rusty shit too) and beautiful fally-downy houses and old bottles and broken furniture and rusty bedsprings and busted carriages and copper shingle roofs.  Fun to imagine life in the Bodie mining boom, with the stamp mill running 20 hours a day so loud you could hear it for miles. I ran my camera battery out taking pictures.

We Bodied out at a little after two, with more left to see but no inclination to walk more hills in the heat. Headed back down the hill (three miles of decent dirt road and ten of winding paved road) into Bridgeport, where we are staying at the Bridgeport Inn, which is lovely except I don't think John will ever let me make reservations for a trip again - at least not until I promise I will never book a place called "historic" - (translation:  up a steep flight of stairs, meager AC and wifi, and cabbage rose wallpaper) - in fact, I may only be allowed to book hotels with the words "howard" and "johnson" in their names.

But I love me some historic, and I DID get us our own bathroom, after all. And we won't need insect repellent. So really there is nothing to complain about, is there?