Lakeshore Live Steamers

For Father's day this year I made Jeff go to what I believed would be a mini train yard, with small trains that we could ride on and watch them roll around the tracks billowing steam.  What we actually found was a man, with a massive, hobbyish love for minute-scale trains, who had built an itsy bitsy track in his backyard.  His backyard people! I found it listed on the city's website for parks, and it was in his backyard! Are you getting a picture of awkwardness yes? Wait, please. Let me go on, there's more.

He was sitting in his backyard wearing a train engineer's hat, sipping cold ones with his buddies (all sitting behind their walkers) and told us to just walk around and have a good time while they sat and chatted and watched us.  Jeff tried to engage them in some conversation, hoping to make everything a little less strange, but it left me alone to chase Sawyer who was a post-church, napless madman.  In slow motion, I saw him run at the train, stop dead, stick his arm out, release his pointer finger and with a steady forward push, poke that miniature train right off the track. As it fell it wrenched out a dismal wail from the dying whistle, then all was unbearably quiet.

Thankfully, it could be mended, and as soon as everything was put right, we all but ran out of that backyard and, needless to say, never returned.

  

What I had hoped the dinky little train yard would be was something like the Lakeshore Live Steamers at Penitentiary Glen.  With two miles of tracks and small, but ride-worthy, trains driven by enthusiastic old men, these trains are not Hobby Lobby standard issue. They run on steam, or coal, engines on tracks with switches.  The wind blows your hair, you weave through trees, all the engineers toot their train whistles and literally everyone is smiling like happy fools.

It is perfect. Not at all awkward. Nothing to be broken. And we didn't have to scuttle out of someone's backyard to get home.