WOW, WOW, WOW

A day full of Wow's...

Wow #1 - This morning I went outside to feed the three and four legged animals and thought, "Wow, it is way too nice of a day to waste it by staying inside the house all day."  It was a beautiful day.  The sun was shining, not a cloud in the sky and no wind.

I was able to convince Van that we needed to go for a ride.  He has been telling me for months that I needed to go to Sunnyside and see the second set of coke ovens.  We had visited one set many years ago but one of his school bus driver friends had introduced him to some others. So, Van was very willing to go touring today.

Wow #2 - There are hundreds of them!  We estimated that there are between 300 and 400 of these coke ovens.  This is one row of them and there is four rows of them.

This photo is a closer up view of the coke ovens.  In the olden days each oven was a complete dome shape with a metal door on the front.  The ovens were filled with coal and it

burned until the coal was burned and all that remained was the coke.  I think the coke from these ovens was taken to the old Geneva Steel plant in Orem.

Wow #3 - I knew that Carbon County had at one time a railway called the Carbon County Railway Company.  I didn't know though that the building still existed!  I was so excited to see the building and be able to stroll through it.  It is way cool to think that the railway was incorporated on July 29th, 1922. My grandparents were living in Sunnyside in March of 1924 and returned to Castle Gate at that time.  I believe they would have gone to this railway and rode the train from Sunnyside to Castle Gate.

Wow #4 - I have a very hard time going somewhere without finding a cemetery to stroll through.  We have been trying to find the Old Sunnyside Power Plant Cemetery for several years and Van had learned where it was so we went to find it.  I was totally surprised with how big it really was.  I was expecting a tiny little place but it covered a pretty large area.  According to the Utah State burial index there are seven individuals still buried there.  Many of the individuals that had been buried there was moved to other locations.

Wow #5 - So, this is the last Wow of the day.  After we finished at the cemetery we stopped at a diner in Sunnyside for lunch.  It was a quaint little place with one Grandma that cooked, waited tables and cashiered. The food was really good when we finally got it.  It took about an hour from the time we walked in until we received our food.  Grandma was very busy with the other customers.  It was a fun place to visit but make sure you have time to chill out before you eat.

About 30 years ago when I worked at Steve's Diesel Service in Helper Van would come and we'd go to lunch in Helper.  Once, we went to this little downstairs diner to eat.  Van likes steak so he ordered a steak to eat.  It wasn't long after we ordered that we saw feet running down the sidewalk outside of the diner.  A few minutes later the feet returned and we found out that he had just run down the street to buy the steak for Vans lunch.

So, today at the little diner the Grandma ran out of hamburgers for lunch.  One of the other local patrons went to the local store to buy hamburgers for her.  When he returned, she didn't like the hamburger patties that he had bought so she called her husband to go to the store and get her some hamburger.   When he showed up with the hamburger we were able to get our lunch cooked.

It was an awesome WOW day today.