training day

Yay, Donna and Jerry are here!

Today we went to Tilden Park, over in East Bay, and took a ride on the Redwood Valley Railway. It was super cool! The Redwood Valley Railway is a model railroad that gives rides on weekends. It's run by a model train hobby group (I can't remember the name), and they make all the parts themselves and try to run the railroad just like a real railroad. They have several engines, all beautifully maintained, and they have repair trains, and roundhouses, and all kinds of other train stuff for which I don't know the technical terms. Everything is built to scale, including the water towers along the track and any associated buildings. It's crazy. There were even some people out on the line, and I don't know if they were just trying to provide more stuff for kids to look at, or if they were actually hobbyists/volunteers at work right that moment. Clearly, I choose to believe they were working on the railroad, all the livelong day.

So here we are at the station. It's just $2 a ride - a bargain! Everyone gets off, and then everyone gets on, and the conductor says conductor-y things like "All aboard!". Charli didn't really have any idea what was going on, and she was a bit worried when she thought her dad was throwing her out of the train window, but that was just for my photo op. We all squished into one of the closed cars rather than an open car, because I thought Charli would enjoy standing up on the ride, and in these cars she had things to hold onto. Once we got going, she just stood at the side and watched everything go by. She was fascinated!

Here we are standing under one of the bridges so you can get a sense of the scale. As we were walking around afterwards, we found more model trains - these model train hobbyists are gung ho! They have another model train that is smaller than the RVR, with accompanying buildings and such, that you can also ride on, but it was closed when we were there. And then next to that is a real model train (i.e. one that is too small to ride), with a long track and a model town and I didn't see any roundhouse. I think the middle sized model train runs along it, so maybe you can ride the one train in order to look at the other. And as a matter of fact, you can see part of the middle sized railroad from the RVR, so if you're there at the right time, you could ride on the model train and see people riding on the other model train so that they can see the other OTHER model train.

After that, we visited Lake Anza and scared some ducks, which flew away quacking. Charli thought this was immensely funny and laughed and laughed, and we even think she said "duck". She has not repeated it, though, so it's always hard to be sure.