Sacramento Field Trip!

Yesterday our family had the privilege of riding a train to Sacramento for a field trip with our school. Brandon was the only one in our family to have ever been on a train before, so it was pretty exciting! We boarded when it was still dark, in Hanford.
Here are the girls checking out the scenery (aka: happy cows of California, really that's all there is to see) once the sun came up.

And here's daddy crashed out for about half the trip up there! Must be nice!

Once we arrived, most of our group went to the History Museum and panned for gold. When planning our trip, we decided to sit that tour out to make the trip more affordable. We arrived at 10 am, and we were already starving for lunch so we ate the lunch I packed for us and then grabbed a treat in a candy store.

We stopped and watched them make taffy and the machine that cuts and wraps it.

Posing for a picture in Old Town.

There was an old schoolhouse open to walk through, and they had swings too!

We walked along the river....

I took this picture so that we could mourn the fact that we didn't budget more for meals, not knowing there was a Joe's Crab Shack right where we would be! Sad, I know!

Just last week the girls learned a little bit about the Pony Express, and how mail was delivered long ago in Social Studies. Here they are posing with the Pony Express statue.

We stopped and sat in the shade to rest out feet from all that walking before meeting our school at the train museum. Cami is showing off her lemur that she bought with the money Nana gave them to spend before we left.

Here we are, being introduced to the Railroad Museum. If you have kids and have never taken them, it is AWESOME!! We LOVED it! People tend to think of trains as a "little boy" interest, but I think they are a timeless and bring out the kid in anyone! This is just K-3rd grade, and the older kids went in at a different time.

There was no way for this picture not to be dark with my camera, but it's really cool!

This is a picture of the train with the girls standing in front of it, above.

Here is Emma, with another train.

They have several that you are able to walk through, this one being a "sleeper" train, where the seats turn into beds.

Here is a picture inside a dining car. This is the kitchen (obviously!).

And here is the dining area. They had the tables set with different china that they had on different train routes.

This is a mail car. Each bag is a town, where they would drop off the mail.

They have a special Thomas the Train area for children under 4 years old to play with.

This train and "tracks" are suspended on a bridge on the second floor of the museum.

They have this AWESOME village set up with big toy trains. It is behind glass, but there are control buttons that the kids can use.

After we left the museum (and you can take as long as you'd like in the museum, she just said once you're out, you can't come back in), we went to Round Table Pizza and ate an early dinner so that we wouldn't need to eat on the Amtrak back to Hanford.

I am in LOVE with this picture. I can't even put my finger on why, I just DO! I had been eyeing this old area every time we walked by it.

We then boarded our train (with a very grumpy woman conductor, I might add!) back to Hanford and settled in for the ride.

Cami crashed out pretty quickly, but the rest of us made it all the way home. It was a great trip!