All Aboard!

Mechelle and I got brave (I think Crazy was the other word people kept using when they saw us with our 6 children under the age of 5--we just call it being a mom!) the other week and took all our kids on the free FrontRunner train to Salt Lake. I will start out the story with this comment: The road to a childs broken heart is sometimes paved with a mothers good intentions (at least thats how I hope our kids see it when they are old enough to understand that the way our day turned out was NOT at all what Mechelle and I had pictured when we started our "fun" adventure!) Just so some of you moms might learn from our mistake(s) when you say to a child "Do you want to ride the train to Salt Lake?" and they answer excitedly "Yes!" they are a little excited for the train ride, but mostly excited because you are going to go to a lake--and what's better on a hot day than going to a lake? In a childs mind a lake is a lake-not a city- and I agree it is a little confusing. So when we arrived in Salt Lake CITY there was more than a little disappointment from our little ones that there was no water in sight! We did however find a small mud puddle on our long hike to the gateway (more about that later) that we told the kids they could play in...luckily none of them took us up on the offer! So after the whole lake mishap we thought we needed to make it up to our kids so we told them we could go see the jumping water at the Gateway (we were under the impression that the drop off for the FrontRunner and the Gateway were closer than they actually are--they happen to be about 8 blocks apart!) But we couldn't disappoint our kids again-could we? So we set off for the Gateway: Mechelle, I, one umbrella stroller, two snugglies (carrying two babies), and 3 disappointed kids (walking.) When we finally made it to the jumping water we noticed it was roped off and there was no water--they were working on it so it was shut off for the day! STRIKE TWO! I'm no baseball fan but we were not doing well (our kids were doing worse!) So we thought "What could fix a mess like this?" We figured the answer was: Ice Cream (it fixes everything, right?) So we made a stop at the local McDonalds and got everyone an ice cream sundae. Ice cream + Chocolate = smiles!

There was some good that came from our trip:

1. We were one of the first people to ride FrontRunner. And the kids did have fun on the actual train ride (playing "I spy" and watching all the horses and cars go past.)



2. Mechelle got to meet a "real" vagabond (although I still have my doubts as to his authenticity--he was WAY to clean and didn't have a smell to him.) She sat by him on the way down to SLC (it was way too crowded for us to sit together) and he told her of his adventures on the rails (I think he was mostly pulling her leg!)



3. Hannah and Wynnie made a new friend. On our way back (Once again it was much too crowded for us to sit together--only this time it was like 50 times worse because people were on their way home from work--I really expected that the engine would give out on the train because we were over the maximum weight limit yet at every stop more people just kept getting on! The train, however, did just fine pulling us all (I guess they are really made for that kind of thing)) there was a nice man who was on his way home from work that entertained them practically the whole way home (they played rock paper scissors and had thumb wars!)



4. Mechelle (and the back of my head) made it on Fox news at 9 as we waited to get on the train to come back home.



5. and, of course, we got ICE CREAM!!
   

I guess the day wasn't a totally loss! I just need to be more careful when explaining things to children!