It isn’t just being in my mid-fifties, peri-menopausal and overweight that leaves me tired. This summer, I agreed to make two (not one, but two) trips with a five-year old grandson. Now that’s enough to make anyone tired, and cranky!
The trips are done (may the heavens be praised!) and I am exhausted. So tired in fact, that I am actually looking forward to the semester’s work and school schedule as a return to normalcy! Here’s what I have to report about our summer adventures. . .
Duluth may look like a big city, but it functions like a BIG small town. We arrived in town mid-day on Saturday only to learn that:
- The accommodations we’d planned to use were clearly not going to work!
- The lines for the event we’d come to see (Tall Ships in the harbor) were averaging five-hour waits!
Neither of these bits of information spelled “good news” from the standpoint of having a five-year old in tow. Waiting is definitely not his strong suite and, along with that, patience is definitely not mine. Hubby dear was a willing participant and, I must add, a great babysitter while I was on the phone for over an hour searching for a place to lay our heads.
We worked it out (as resourceful people always do) but suffice it to say, Duluth, the town proper, did not make our access to options particularly easy. We found a motel; bare-bones and definitely not someplace we’d choose if there were choices. And, we decided to do our darnedest to be first in line on Sunday morning, even if that meant getting up before the crack of dawn.
Hence, our merry band made the best of our time together. The grandson saw some lovely sites, climbed some metal sculptures, got generally dirty as a five-year old can get and ate reasonably well given he was with two old and travel-worn visitors to this Never-Never-Land.
The second trip was the Big Train Ride, or perhaps more well stated, the ride on the big train! This was an all-day Saturday affair that also had a few hitches in it. What looked at the start of things as a well made plan, turned out to be an endurance test that finally ended late Sunday evening.
We began our journey by car, driving from our Southwest Minneapolis suburb to the Eastern edge of St. Paul where the Amtrak station is well disguised as a wear-house or a homeless shelter. Arriving 45 minutes ahead of our planned departure, we ended up waiting over an hour in St. Paul due to unexpected and unavoidable train delays.
Once on the train, we found three seats in relative proximity and made friends with a jovial conductor/steward who immediately presented our grandson with an honorary, your-first-trip-on-a-train cap which he proudly wore for the rest of the weekend. We ate breakfast in the dining car, sat and watched the scenery from the snack lounge, and whiled away the time with crayons as the train jostled down the track toward LaCrosse, Wisconsin, our exotic destination for the day.
Once in Wisconsin, we found the train station to be something out of a Harry Potter story. It was oak and brass with an ancient clock that still kept time and welcomed weary travelers such as we. Plus, it had restrooms large enough to accommodate an adult and a child which is very useful when one of the travelers still doesn’t quite have the hang of all the steps involved in assuring hygiene in public places.
We found a taxi cab, already burdened with passengers, whose driver assured us she would return for us and take us to our destination – the local scenic tour trolley. She did return but, alas, dropped us off at the bus station, not the trolley stop and so we missed that connection. Plan “B” turned out to be a walk down to the river where a blow-out celebration of summer was in play with sandcastles, games, a circle-the-park play-train ride and several of those brightly-colored, enormous, blown-up, jump-and-bounce energy expenders. These behemoths were our salvation because they served to wear the five-year old down and keep his energy in check throughout the day.
Having avoided all the sugary options that filled the riverfront park, we set out at the end of our afternoon to locate a real dinner. To the adults, this meant finding a place where libations could be sipped and composure reassembled in relative quiet. We found just such a place and had a lovely round of drinks while waiting for a table. There, we hurried our way through a meal meant to be savored but enjoyed the flavors anyway.
The restaurant hostess called a cab for us and we were off to the antique train station to wait for our locomotive which was, once again, unavoidably delayed. The best part of this waiting was seeing the five-year old’s eyes light up when he saw the train engine approaching. He had not seen the front of the train on the earlier trip, so waiting for it, seeing it arrive and finally boarding it was an unusual pleasure to watch him enjoy.
The ride home was mostly endured in darkness. Proximal seats were more difficult to find and when we did find three nearby each other, they were across from the doorways that permitted access from our car to the next. Each time these doors opened the temperature changed and the noise increased by several decibels. All that aside, the five-year old made good use of his time drawing and coloring pictures of trains, boats, cars and, strangely enough, cactus.
Arriving back in St. Paul around eleven at night, we scooped our weary five-year old up and got him into his car-seat. The journey home was mostly traffic-less and we arrived tired and dirty but relatively undamaged. We slept until eight in the morning (a luxury in our house any day) and used the first two hours of our Sunday to read the paper, watch the news, fix some breakfast, shower and dress us all for church, in downtown Minneapolis.
We are Catholic, our grandson’s parents are not so, going to mass is always an interesting adventure. Fortunately the enormous church organ with its beautiful and bellowing tones captured his attention right away. And while I would not say the hour flew by, at least it did not seem like a torturous event to him.
Sunday afternoon was devoted to the air-show at the local community airport. Grandpa and grandson lasted two hours at this grand gala and the rest of the afternoon was devoted to napping in an effort to catch up on the rest we all seemed to need to recover from our journeys.
Would I do it all again?
Probably not, unless you give me a few months to recover and ask me when the neck-pain and the bruises have faded. Then only the nostalgia will remain and I, like all the other doting grandparents on the planet, will happily sign up to do some new and exciting adventure with the little guy who reminds me why childhood is so magical.
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