Staycation

So the Lovejoy-Fordham Alliance was supposed to be camping up in Northern California this week. We were going to be hanging out with friends and generally enjoying the great outdoors, but instead we are having a staycation: I'm staying at the library to work on my dissertation and Tom is staying at home to take care of Lilybeth. It's a bit disappointing to be stuck in Riverside, especially with the summer heat starting to set in, but a complete rough draft of my dissertation is due in less than two weeks, and it was rather silly of me to think I'd be taking a week to camp.

But Tom still has this week off of work, and so we decided to have a little family time yesterday morning and visit the Orange Empire Railway Museum, which is about 20 minutes south of R'side in Perris. The museum is free, and it was a pleasant way to fill a couple of hours and get a break from writing. Plus LB and Tom are such train enthusiasts at the moment.

Here's Papa and Baby walking through the Signal Garden, where kids can push buttons to light up the various train signals.

Then, we went inside the trolley barn. This is an old trolley from Kyoto, Japan.
And a trolley from 1911.
Some interesting old ads pasted inside the trolley:


One of the various storage barns.
Something old.
While we were at the museum, I was surprised to run into an old friend. When I was a kid in Victorville, we used to visit this park that had a huge steam engine that we could climb up into. When I saw this fellow sitting at the museum, it brought back memories of the park and engine.
But when I read the little placard on the engine, I realized it was probably the same one I used to play on! The placard states that the train was moved from a park near Victorville to the museum in 1996 (my sophomore year in high school), and that it is being restored. Funny! Well I wish the engine luck in it's future!

An old carriage.
Some old mining carts.
Apart from the old trains and the Signal Garden, the museum had some fun things for the kiddies to do, like playing in a little trolley and pretending to drive a caboose.





Overall, it was a nice little morning, and when we got back home, I headed off to the library to get four hours of work in before a special guest arrived: my brother John!
John flew down from Portland yesterday afternoon to start his road trip with our brother Donald. The pair is going to be taking two weeks to drive around the Western states (they are only going as far east as Colorado). I'm sooo jealous! I love a good road trip. We all went out to dinner, and then the boys headed up to our parents' house. They were planning to be up by 5 to get on the highway.
John's moustache!