We've been riding on the railroad...

While planning a weekend away at the House of the Four Cousins, we realized Baba had to work half of the weekend. Suddenly it made more sense for him to drive and have Louis and me take the train.

Louis was so excited. He told me we would be pulled by a steam engine, and I didn't argue. I have learned to pick my arguments only on important issues--whether pants are necessary, for example.

I wasn't nervous about traveling alone with Louis. Once you have traveled 27 hours straight with a child who barely knows you (only to find that your last flight has been canceled and you have to drive through five states to get home), a 3 1/2-hour train ride seems like a breeze. Besides, Louis is much more mature than he was when we flew home together from China 15 months ago, and he adores trains. I figured we were golden.

For once, I was right.

The hardest part, of course, was waiting for the train to leave. Louis wanted his train to leave now. Not in a half hour. Not in 10 minutes. Right now.

So we walked around the station. We read Tootle. And I tried to keep track of the two most unruly passengers in our crew--Cat in the Hat and Puppydog.

Eventually, we climbed down the steps to the tracks, and pulling into the station was our very own (diesel) train. Thank goodness the voice on the speaker said, "All aboard!" Louis likes his train experiences to be authentic.

He couldn't wait to climb aboard and find seats.

Then for a good 20 minutes this is all I could see.

 

Attempts to view my son's facial expressions? Absolutely futile. He was completely absorbed.

But I could see that the Cat in the Hat was enjoying himself.

With his insatiable interest in trains, Louis just looked and looked. And he wasn't disappointed.

We saw freight trains and more freight trains.

We zoomed across bridges.

 

Sometimes another train passed right next to us--very exciting, but hard to appreciate from our train. Louis asked some questions I could answer--and others I wished Baba had been along to handle.

When our train fan finally focused his attention to the inside of the train car, he noticed that there was food in our bag. A glimpse of food always reminds Louis that he is hungry.

"Lunch?" he asked. It was 8:45 a.m. I handed over the bag of Cheerios.

Like a moviegoer inhaling popcorn...

Louis kept one eye on the window and another on the food.

Then he moved on to a banana.

He turned down the raisins and the breakfast bars for some M&Ms. Then, after many pages of train drawings (commissioned by Louis, drawn by his mother), I noticed it was almost 10:30--surely lunchtime in some corner of the world, right?

I brought out the PB&J--or what Louis calls "a Grandpa sandwich." He showed the teenage girl sitting across from us that he could make it into "a Dagwood sandwich"--and yes, I think she was impressed--and he ate about half of it.



With almost an hour left of our journey, I broke out two new trucks.

 

While the world rushed by outside our window, Louis happily stayed on his seat and gave his trucks a spin. We even created a parking lot for them.



Then he showed me how he could take them apart and put them back together.

When he started to tire of the trucks, I brought out my secret weapon.

The wooden train.

And not just any wooden train.

The diesel passenger car train--yes, we refer to it only by full name--that is his absolute favorite. It has no face, no British first name, no TV or book series. It's just a train. Oops, sorry. It's just a diesel passenger car train.

 

 We (I) drew tracks for it and Louis was as happy as a preschool engineer on his first train journey.

Near the end of the trip, more seats opened up, so we moved to seats with tables. Louis thoroughly approved of his table.

 

It was a perfectly lovely ride, but I would have been content to get off after two hours. My son, on the other hand, was glued to the window as we approached our destination.

As we pulled into our station, he said, "See more trains?"

Yes, this boy is a train fan.

We got off the train without forgetting a single stuffed or vehicular friend and saw Aunt Maureen and cousins Mary and Paul waiting for us across the tracks. We yelled to them and they yelled back. Then we ran to meet them. It was a wonderful moment--almost like something out of a movie.

After we were safely in "Julia's car" and headed to the cousins' house, I turned around and said to Louis, "Tell Mary about the train."

"Mary!" Louis said with excitement. I held my breath waiting to see what he would say. Would he talk about the other trains we had seen? The cities we went through? The stations we stopped at? The friendly conductor? The teenage girl he tried to befriend? The endless snack supply? The bridges we crossed?

"We got on the train," he said, "and we got off and you were there!"

Now that version would certainly have made for a shorter blog. ;)