Last Wednesday, we embarked on our decidedly annual trip to Lancaster to ride on Thomas the Tank Engine and go to Dutch Wonderland. We had so much fun last year, we planned on bringing the kids back this year. The 5 hour car ride is less than desirable, and we squeezed everyone(Tom and me and our 3 kids and Aubrey and her 2 kids)into our good old Saturn Relay. Needless to say, with 5 kids ages 5 and under, it seemed a lot longer than 5 hours! We survived the ride there only to squeeze our families into a two room suite. We were really trying to be thrifty and I think we succeeded.
Luckily, our incredibly charming hotel(The Historic Strasburg Inn)had this really awesome Amish built playset in the back to keep the kids occupied while we packed for each days events. The above picture of Olivia reminds me of Little House on the Prairie with the field and log cabin in the background.
Thursday had rain and thunderstorms forcasted so we planned to do a few indoor things including visiting The Choo Choo Barn. We took Hunter to this awesome miniature railroad the first time we came to ride Thomas when he was two. It is a gigantic layout of the city of Lancaster with tons of moving details. There's a baseball game, a carnival, a miniature Dutch Wonderland, an Amish Barn raising, and my personal favorite, the house on fire. So much cool stuff to look at! A little fire truck actually drives to the house that's on fire and a little fireman puts a ladder up and another guy gets the hose out and actual water gets sprayed on the house to douse the flames! This is totally amazing to watch.
There are dig sites, and gas stations and a parade going around one of the blocks in town, and of course...the trains!
Outside of the miniature village, the kids climbed around on this wooden engine.
I love how this shot floated down here, crazy blogger!
From the left is Malacai, Olivia, Gryffin, Nadia and Hunter on the gazebo swing at the hotel. It's more difficult than you think getting a photograph of the five of them!
Hunter looking cute.
Gryffin was obsessed with this monster truck ride at Dutch Wonderland. He must have ridden it about 10 times!
We had a blast in the water park called Duke's Lagoon. There are baby water slides and water shoots out everywhere!
We rented a stroller from the park because we couldn't fit ours in the van, and I knew the babies would need a nap during the day. Unfortunately, the rented stroller is nowhere near as comfy as our cadillac of a stroller and it was difficult for them to fall asleep while sitting so upright in the hard molded plastic stroller. Eventually, I found a nice peaceful trail by a river that was away from all the noise of the park and they drifted off.
All 3 of my kids sleep with their eyes partially open, it's kind of creepy.
We wrapped up our trip on Saturday with the Day out with Thomas event. It was a very beautiful but hot day and patience was wearing thin with kids and adults. Everyone was excited to ride the train and we even saw some Amish farmers with a horse drawn plow harvesting some sort of crop during the ride.
All in all, it was a great trip. Olivia and Gryffin were suffering from some sort of stomach bug and that wasn't too fun but it wasn't enough to ruin our trip and I'm sure we'll be back next year...
