Day Out On The Railway

We had a long weekend away in Shropshire from Friday to Monday. The destination was chosen partly because it's close to where we live and could be reached easily enough on a Friday evening, but largely because we we near the Llangollen Heritage Railway, which was holding a Thomas The Tank Engine day on Sunday.

I was quite looking forward to this, but G's excitement was on another level. Kind of like her birthday and Christmas put together. "Look, it's Thomas!" she shouted as we walked through the town to the station and saw an engine painted bright blue. It wasn't difficult to see why she was so impressed. With lots of noise and steam everywhere as he trundled up and down the track, he certainly bore a much stronger resemblance to what the real Thomas might look like than supermarket Santas do to Father Christmas.

Thomas was doing short rides up and down the station, but we also went on a longer journey on a different train. The picture shows G with it. Because of the vaguely green colour she immediately decided this was Percy, and did "choo choo" noises much of the way.

Trying to get G to leave at the end of the afternoon was a bit harder. Traditional inducements, in the form of a promise of a "special treat" or even some chocolate were met with a firm "no thank you". I told Mrs J to bring out the secret weapon: "If we leave now, we can go and get some ice cream" only to get another "Um... no thank you!" in reply.

So, there were inevitably some tears, but G had got over it by the time we walked across the road to the sweet shop. And, equally inevitably, she talked about Thomas all the way home.

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