Family Daycation

I love Fall and especially Fall drives.  Every now and then I get itchy for a family "daycation", meaning that we pack up as a family, load a picnic lunch, and drive somewhere cool that we can get to in 2 hours or less.  When researching daycations, I always check out the local ghost towns first to see if there are any within range.  This is one I had been wanting to check out for awhile.

It is called Cheterfield and it is near Soda Springs.  With us living in Blackfoot now, it put us within range of our daycation goal and we went for it.

Chesterfield is one of the bigger ghost towns I have been to.  It had a whole city of very historic and well preserved abandoned buildings.

This is the church house.  We ate our picnic lunch on the church house lawn.

Apparently, on weekdays you can go and tour through the buildings, unfortunately, we came after hours and had to settle for peeking through the windows.

You can kind of see inside?

It was a great place to visit, I am inspired to come again during open hours to actually walk through the approx. 15-20 buildings that stand vacant.  History is so fascinating to me.

We also decided that while we were close to Soda Springs, we would visit.  It was honestly a smaller town than I expected but held some fun attractions that made it worth the while.  There is a fun little park called Hooper Springs, where they have an artesian well where the soda water bubbles up.  You can walk down to it and drink the water... worth doing once in your life, but not I wouldn't recommend it for daily consumption.  Soda Springs also has a geyser (like Old Faithful) that they have put on a timer and it goes off every hour.  Unlike Old Faithful, you can get up close and personal with this geyser and play in it's spray.  Seriously... the sign near the geyser shows kids in their swimming suits playing in the geyser, even though this is a "natural" hot springs geyser.  We weren't quite brave enough to jump in while it was going off, but we did take off our shoes and socks afterwards and splash in the geyser puddles.  Fun!  We also explored an ice cave in the area which was fascinating and very fun.

All in all it was a great daycation and cost us no more than the gas to get there.