Today is Liesl’s very first St. Valentine’s day and also her cousin Madeline’s ninth birthday. I am blessed with the rare situation that I do not need to work at all today. We got a chance to sleep in a little bit this morning which is awesome for a change.
The weather is awesome today. Not too much wind and bright sun. Oreo is very happy.
Dominica and I decided that today was going to be model railroading day. This past week has been so crazy that this weekend needs to be about relaxing.
We did some looking around to see what local model railroading shops are available. It turns out that there is a model train and candy shop on North Division which is the Maple Ave extension in downtown Peekskill. Extremely easy to get to from our house. It is called Treat Station.
We were all going to go down to the shop but Liesl was not in the best mood and were unsure how the shop was going to be so I just ran downtown all by myself to make a quick trip. They didn’t have too much train stuff but I was able to pick up the 2008 Walther’s catalogue and some model train books. I also picked up some chocolate truffles, as it is Valentine’s day, to take home to Dominica.
I got home and was just beginning to look at the books when Dominica spotted the Woodland Scenic’s Mod-U-Rail system as a possible solution to our issues with doing benchwork. Neither of us have any carpentry skills whatsoever so it is important to find a foam based solution from which to work. So we decided that we would go back down and see if there was something that we could get.
Around seven this evening we packed up Liesl and Oreo and we took a short little trip downtown. Oreo was very excited to be able to go for a ride in the car. He almost never gets out these days. He misses his car trips. Liesl was not so excited until we got to Treat Station.
Dominica had them fire up the Lionel train display for Liesl and Liesl was very pleased to watch the trains go around for several minutes. We talked to the store and they did not have the materials that we were seaking at the moment but were able to order them for us and are hoping to have them for us on Monday or Tuesday at the latest.
We have decided that we are going to start by doing some purely scenery based projects just to learn some techniques and then we are going to do a small, starter layout of approximately six feet by three feet on foam backing on which to see if we can model a nice, complete, working layout with running train and everything. Then, if that goes well and we enjoy it, we can look to making a real layout that will be built to the wall by my desk.
While at the Treat Station we got root bear floats and drank them at the soda fountain that they have there. It is small but they have an old fashion soda fountain. Very neat.
After our little outing we had a nice, relaxing evening at home.