Our Day Out With Thomas

On Saturday, we spend the Day Out With Thomas! We missed our beloved Thomas when he was in Green Bay a few months ago, but he returned to the little town of Union, IL and we took a road trip. Click on the headline of this post to learn more about the event.
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The boys were delighted to ride on a car pulled by their buddy Thomas.
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They got a passing glance at Sir Topham Hatt (the line to meet him was VERY long and we didn’t quite have the patience to wait)
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Joseph shows off his "Junior Engineer" certificate.
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Luke and Patrick inspect their certificates - doesn't Luke look like he's reading it? The binkies were a necessity to keep the peace since the little ones didn't get much of a nap on the drive down.
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Joe points out some corn fields on the 15 minute ride.
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Scott and the boys enjoying their ride.
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All of us on the way back to the station.

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This was just a small segment of the line of strollers. You can't see past the line of people, but the strollers went on for at least 50 yards.

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Luke gets a Thomas tattoo.
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Patrick inspects his new tatoo.
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They even had a Lego Thomas on display.

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Joseph and Mommy take some time to look at the exhibits at the museum where the event was held. Joe is checking out an old sleeping car.
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Santa Fe was quite a big deal for my family - several aunts and uncles worked there, and our good friend Doug will be working there soon. When I called to tell my dad about what we saw, he mentioned that just the day before, he bought the boys some of their stock. What a funny coincidence.
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Daddy and Patrick play engineers.
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You might have to click on this picture to capture the pure joy of it. Joseph LOVED the inflatables they had to play on, too.

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Some quotes from the day:

“Thomas didn’t say goodbye to me!” – Joseph

“NOOOOOO! I WANNA GET DOWN! I WANNA GO THAT WAY! (pointing back to Thomas) NO! WHAAAAA! (kicking and flailing furiously) NO, NO, NOOOOOO!” – Joseph upon leaving the “Day Out With Thomas” event being carried securely by Daddy on the entire half mile trek back to our car. Delightful
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We saw some pretty serious flooding on our drive and on the train ride. There were lots of corn stalks rotting and fallen in the farmland. We also saw this park. If you look closely, you can see the fences for the baseball fields that are totally underwater.

On our way home, we stopped in this little town. It's hard to see it from the picture, but the water tower was painted like a basketball and proudly announced that Hebron was the home of the 1952 state champions. Kind of sad that nothing has happened since then to warrent the changing of the water tower.

Overall, we had a wonderful day. The whole event was little boy paradise!