So it was an excellent last week of 2017 that crossed out few lines from my 2017 year to-do list. We spent a week car tripping through the USA South West and visiting well-known and less-known impressive places.
The Calico Ghost town was a first place we stopped.
The plan was to leave San Francisco Bay Area on Friday evening and overnight on Bakersfield. But the road from Bakersfield to Arizona is way too long to do it without stop. The apparent decision was to stop somewhere in the Mojave region.
I had a map of the locations that I would like to visit in the USA. My organized part grouped all location by the activities. The only problem I have one or two groups of sites displayed all the time, while all others are hidden. So was with the historic locations group.
The creation of the plan for this vacation was started in September (and even earlier in my head). And truth to be told I had a hard time defying activities for the first day. The Mojave is big. And there are a lot of places. But still I wasn’t able to come up with something good.
It was a Monday of the week before the departure. I called one places to make a tour reservation. I had grand expectations. And the person on the other side of the call stopped them just with one sentence. “We are booked till March.” I returned to my map. And in a second found Calico. It was so obvious to make me laugh.

And so on Saturday January 24th we parked at Calico Ghost Town.
The town that lived from the mining activities and became abandoned by the end of 19th century. In 50th Walter Knott bought the town to restore it. Some say after the restoration only 5 original building remained.

The schoolhouse that caught my attention and stole my heart is a replica of the original building that stood in the same place.


Another attraction that worse attention here is the Calico & Odessa Railroad. The narrow gauge track is a remake of the 3 ft Waterloo Mining Railroad. The original line hauled silver ore from Calico had the different path.