Tuesday, August 5, 2008

I've Been Workin' on the Railroad....Down On the Farm...With a Side of Tossed Cookies

Well, there you have it. Our PA vacation summed up in one sentence! Oh, you want more? Oh, well then I shall oblige your request. :)

We spent a week in exciting Dillsburg, PA with Philip's parents, who have recently located there, and Philip's brother's family. We had a great time...except for all the throwing up. But alas, I get ahead of myself. We'll start with the fun stuff.

It turns out that Strasburg, PA (which is about an hour from exciting Dillsburg) is
home to several railroad museums and a functioning "tourist" train, so on Monday we headed there with our train-loving boys. They enjoyed seeing and climbing aboard the old steam engines and diesels, but what they really had the best time with were all the toy trains in the "hands on" area. I think they could have stayed in there playing all day...or maybe even all week. Then we had a picnic lunch before hopping aboard the real train for a 45 minute ride. Well, it was really like a 15 minute ride, but they put in enough stops to make it last 45. :) The boys enjoyed this too and while riding we even got a sneak peek at the Farm we visited on Wednesday!

Tuesday was my birthday, but we've already talked about that! :)

Wednesday we headed to Ferry Farm...which sports it's own huge corn maze. Given we had
an abundance of small children, we decided to attempt the mini maze instead, which after we did it we decided had definitely been large enough! They also had other fun games, mazes and a petting zoo. It was a fun time...but it was really hot that day, so by 1:00 we were all fried...literally.

This part cracks me up. This was a hay maze where the rule was that you could only make left turns to get to the end. Of course, on hand we have Philip the engineer and his PhD holding engineer brother. The boys wander around a bit with no success...then they try to solve the maze backwards. After about 5-10 minutes of trying, they both concluded that the maze was "impossible" and moved on to greener pastures. I, the non-engineer in the family, decided that it *had* to be possible and set at it. A few minutes later, I casually wandered out the "exit" of the maze. But, I couldn't remember how I did it, so I tried again. I did it again and watched a few other people also complete it. The engineer boys were later informed of the impossible feat and declared "impossible! can't be done!". Paul later successfully made it through...although there is no witness other than his wife, which is highly suspect, don't you think?? Philip still asserts that the maze is impossible and that I *must* have cheated. Riiiigggghhhhttt. Ask me later about the growing list of "engineery" things I seem to be able to do that my engineer husband can't. :)

Thursday was going great with a nice picnic by a little river when Joshua threw up. And that
was the beginning of the end. Ok, not really. But there was a lot of stomach sickness after that for the next week with all of us being affected. I, of course, waited until we were back home and I had the boys by myself to get sick. Isn't that what moms always do? Alas.

Anyway, the rest of the visit was pretty low-key because of all the sickies, but it was still nice to be with family. We had a blast...and then came home. Back to reality!

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