Wirelesstrips.com

Today was the much-anticipated highlight of our trip for Max and Mason. A four-hour train ride on the New Tygart Flyer! The excitement started, however, before we even got to the train station! We woke up to a downpour. Richard got soaked just ferrying all of us to the van with our one umbrella. When we got into Elkins, we were stunned to see rising water everywhere! It must happen frequently because city crews were already shutting down roads. Dale (Grampa) successfully managed to avoid several flooded streets and got us safely to the train station. We had to park in employee parking because the entrance to the public parking lot was under water.

The train ride was very relaxing and the scenery was beautiful. A retired couple sitting at our table was from about an hour north of Elkins. A volunteer named Junior Ervin rode in our car and told us historical facts and pointed out landmarks, like the river that has some of the best trout fishing in the East. He knew EVERYTHING, including the names of the campgrounds and towns we passed through, the uses of the different railroad poles and hardware along the track (he was retired from the railroad) and lots of facts about the coal mines in West Virginia. When we passed a house with what looked like an old family cemetery in the backyard, we asked him about it. He simply replied, “Pets.” We’d never seen such an elaborate pet cemetery and we got a kick out of Junior not getting stumped on even one question. He truly made that train ride much more than it would have been without him!

We stopped at a waterfall and took some pictures. The train crew fed us a nice lunch of sandwiches, fruit salad, macaroni salad, tea and lemonade. On the return trip, they came through with huge platters of cookies and brownies.

After the train ride, Grampa bought Max and Mason each a toy train. We ate pizza for dinner at CJ Maggie’s. That was YUMMY! After rolling ourselves out of there, we stopped at Dairy Queen on the way home, at Mason’s request (yeah, like we needed Mason as an excuse to stop for dessert!). Everything was still wet when we got back to the campground but that didn’t stop Richard from starting another fire with Dale while I did some cleaning in the RV. Grampa and Rita are leaving tomorrow. When Max realized that at dinner, he started crying.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.