A Day out with Thomas

Part 2 of Carver's birthday finally came Saturday, A Day out with Thomas! I have been talking this thing up for weeks so Carver and Kaydree were definitely excited for it... After getting the girls settled with Nana and Caitlin, we headed to the Grapevine Vintage Railroad where the whole place was set up sort of like a carnival. There were several different areas to visit: An imagination station with tons of trains set up to play with, a storytelling area, a Thomas bounce house, a Thomas gift shop with tons of loot, a petting zoo, a big sandbox complete with dumptrucks and toys, lots of fried food vendors (think state fair), and more. We pretty much did it all (except for the sandbox, I didn't feel like cleaning up sand for the next week).
One of the tents was a display of tons of electric trains (apparently this is a popular hobby for retired men, they even have their own club...who knew?) The kids really liked watching all the trains...Okay, so maybe Ryan liked watching the trains just a little bit too...Next it was time to ride the train. Carver was really careful to hold onto his ticket while he waited for the conductor to punch it... It was a nice little ride that lasted around 20 minutes. When I first bought the tickets, I thought we would actually be riding on Thomas the train. A friend of mine warned me not to be disappointed, we really just rode on cars pulled by a little Thomas replica. Kaydree's favorite part of the day was meeting Sir Topham Hatt, she was totally convinced that he was the real deal...Carver's favorite part of the day hands down was when we let him loose in the Thomas bounce house...I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when Kaydree and every other little kid went down the inflatable slide like this...But Carver chose to go down like this...I wasn't surprised, but it still made me laugh. We'll probably go back next year, but rather than pay for everyone to ride the train (kinda pricey) we'll probably just let Carver and Ryan ride it and the rest of us will do the free stuff...