National Train Day

 

Saturday was National train day and Jayme is choo choo crazy. Every morning we watch Chuggington, every day at school he is drawing or playing with his trains and then every night, huge wooden railroads zig zag our hallways and bedrooms.

His teacher sent us an email giving us a heads up about the event and we quickly updated our weekend plans with Jayme.  Joshua for the past week had been having some tooth pain so he had a 8:45am dentist appointment Saturday morning. He got up early and took the MAX to his appointment, then Sam left and headed to work.

After a few hours Joshua called and was ready to be pick up so Jayme and Anthony drove over and picked him. Turned out he did need some dental work and he has a mild infection in his jaw. So Joshua dropped Anthony and Jayme off at the MAX station and the he headed home  to sleep and enjoy the pain meds.

Jayme LOVES taking the MAX, the ride is never long enough. But this time the excitement of seeing new trains over powered his normal MAX excitement. At every stop Jayme’s eyes would get big and he would ask if we where downtown yet. Only to look a bit crestfallen while being told no. But, once we started to cross the steel bridge the payout happened. Choo choo steam clouds could be seen drifting up from the Union station.

We got off the MAX and started our short walk to the train station. Just as we arrived the classic stream train gave a long blast through its whistle. WOOOOOOOOOOOO WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. If Jayme could have exploded with joy, that would have been the moment. Anthony’s arm was nearly dislocated in the accelerated push to get to the trains.

We then watched the Amtrak Cascades train pull into the station and then headed inside. The train station was jam packed with muggles, so we quickly moved outside to see the trains. There were three lines of people. We got into the first line and ended up onboard a current Amtrak sleeper car. We found a sleepertteand closed our selfs off inside and started to pretend we were on a real train ride. We sat in the seat and opened up the tray table, pressed all the buttons for lights and even pulled down the top bed and Jayme climbed up and pretended to sleep.

The next line was a bit longer, and as we worked our way towards the next rail car to explore a large modern Amtrak train growled and hissed by us. Jayme is not big on loud sounds but handled the loud scary noises pretty well.

After exploring an old dining car and climbing through a big yellow caboose we came to the last line. The last line was to look into the control cab of the HUGE steam train. But as the weather started to change and sprinkles started to fall we did a quick walk by and headed to a little utility engine that was open for kids to climb into. Jayme had a lot of fun pulling the leavers and pressing the buttons.

We then did a tour of Union Station on the inside. There were lots of tables, but the one that really captured Jayme’s attention was the huge lego train set.

For lunch, the plan was to dine in our old stomping grounds on Stark street at the Roxy,where Uncle Sam works. We walked up into the pearl district and hopped on a streetcar and zoomed over to the glamor district. For those counting that was our 2nd train ride of the day, well at least as Jayme was concerned.

Once at the Roxy we found the best table (one that we could watch Sam work from) and had a great little lunch, well breakfast for lunch that is. Jayme ordered a HUGE pancake and ate every last bite of it. Anthony had a cheese omelet and toast. Jayme really liked the Roxy, and was very talkative to our waiter. He did not understand why that guy was nailed on the wall.

After lunch we said our goodbyes to Sam and our new friends and walked over to Powells books. Jayme has also developed a fondness for Berenstain bear books. We wandered down to the children’s area and found 4 new Berenstain bear books. Jayme then wanted to explore the HUGE book store so we started to look for some new model train books. We did this by walking all the way to the top of Powells and then all the way down. We then we headed back up to the travel section picked up something for our secret family road trip later this month.

The final treat for the day was taking the MAX all the way home and getting off at “Anthony’s Stop”.

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