A Day Out with Thomas

Joshua's school had a flyer that they put in all the kids take home folders advertising that Thomas the Train was rolling into town on Oct. 1,2, & 3. Joshua is really getting into trains now, and so Dan and I thought it would be fun to take him to ride on a real train. We bought our tickets online like 2 weeks ago and today was finally the day. Joshua does not fully "know" who Thomas the Train is, he just calls it a choo choo train, fair enough! Our departure time was 9:20am and we were supposed to arrive an hour early, so that meant that we had to get up at 6:30 in order to leave by 7, because the train station was about an hour away. Let me just say that no where on the website did it say to get there an hour early. I only found this out when the tickets came in. I would not have chosen this early of time if I would have known that, but it actually worked out nicely, because it was not crowded at all. When we arrived we got to see Thomas and take a picture in front of him. Joshua wasn't into smiling that early in the morning, so we took a couple of pics and moved on. While waiting for our departure time, we saw a man on a unicycle that was juggling and Joshua thought that was really neat! We also went into the imagination tent, where they had a few train tracks set up for the kids to play with and a couple of bounce houses off to the side that looked like trains to jump in. Joshua loved(understatement) the train tracks and promptly asked for his choo choo train that we had brought from home so he could test out the tracks. He kept saying "All Aboard" real loud and then would move his train along the tracks. He was having a good time. Then the conductor blew the whistle to let everyone know that Thomas was coming into the station and that made Joshua jump a little. It was finally our turn to ride the train, so with a little coxing we pulled Joshua away from the pretend train tracks, and boarded the train, Thomas the Train! Joshua was a little skeptical at first but once the train's whistle blew and the conductor said "All Aboard" it was all good. Joshua loved looking out at all the different scenery and kept saying "train moves fast, train moves slow" The conductor came through and punched our tickets and said hello to everyone. The train ride was about 25 mins long and that was just enough time. We went to the gift shop on our way out(I know bad move) to see if there was anything reasonable to get Joshua for his Day Out with Thomas. We settled for a Thomas the Train balloon, which he was perfectly ok with! Below our some pics from the morning!