The Santa Train

Can you tell how excited they were to see Santa?!

Too bad this is blurry!

Saturday after Jason got home we all headed to lunch and to ride on the Santa Train. The kids have been obsessed with The Polar Express movie this year (I could probably quote the whole movie by now)! There is a train museum about an hour from here and they do seasonal rides (fall foliage, Thomas comes to town once a year, wine train tours, etc) and during the Christmas season they do a Santa Train. It was a little expensive but we decided to treat the kids to it and make the whole train experience come alive for them.

First on the agenda was to fill up our bellies. We stopped a The Original Pancake house and had some yummy brunch. Then we headed out to the train museum. We got there about 15 mins before the train left and it was CROWDED! When we got on our assigned car the only seats left were on the sunny side of the train. O well, we survived the sun.

Jackson, "ts Santa!" and Abygail hiding from Santa

Shortly after departure Santa came through our car. Abygail was very shy and covered her face the entire time. Jackson was fine as long as Santa kept a reasonable distance. They both knew who he was, Jackson even pointed at him and said "ts (it's) Santa". They may not have liked Santa being so close but they enjoyed the candy canes his elf passed out. After Santa some more elves came through and sang songs. We enjoyed singing Jingle Bells and Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer when the Elf sat across from us. The conductors came through and punched our tickets and chatted...we got a picture with ours, who also happened to be the oldest on the train...and probably the cutest too. Another Conductor did some magic tricks for the kids. We all had fun.

Jason and the kids de-boarding

It was a good experience for the kids, but I don't think we'll do it again. Unfortunately only half of the windows on the train DIDN'T fog up and ours was not one of them so we couldn't see out our windows and the tracks were blocked or backed up before we got to our midway point so we had to turn back early. It was about a 1 hour train ride total. The museum itself was ok but most of the toy trains were not even running and there were no BIG or REAL trains to tour (at least that we saw). So, although it was a fun time we overall thought it was not worth the cost. I'm still glad we went...but next time we'll just do something Christmasy closer to home and less expensive.