Ian’s Realm

I wanted give our son, Spidermonkey, something amazing for his 3^rd birthday. (Obviously, Spidermonkey is not his real name.)  He liked Thomas the Tank Engine Train from PBS Sprouts. I found a Thomas the Tank Engine Train event with real train in our area. It was on his birthday. Perfect! The drive up to Hood River was beautiful. We drove up 84, up the Columbia gorge, past forests and waterfalls, jagged rocks and always the amazing river to our left. We arrived at the small community of Hood River. It’s known for it’s windsurfing and what seemed to be half a hundred wind surfers were visible in the river by the park. The town had a turn of the century (1900s, not 2000s) feel to it, like back drop for a western. We followed the signs to the train station and the Thomas the Tank Engine Event.

Before I go any further, I need to explain my tone for the rest of this piece. I wanted this to be a wonderful experience, and the reality was so disappointing and it was hard to find the nuggets of nice within the truckloads of drek. I had built up in my head that this was going to be such a momentous event, so amazing that Spidermonkey would remember this for the rest of his life. His earliest fuzzy memory would be this magical ride on Thomas the Tank Engine. Any time Spidermonkey saw a train, he would sub consciously think of us. I, his Daddy and Conner, his Poppa, had…Caused…This…To…HAPPEN! (About now, there is a overdone chorus of angels in the background.) I realize now, it was no longer about Spidermonkey, it was about ME, the BRINGER OF THE TRAIN!

So when I saw the reality, I was crushed. I was not the BRINGER OF THE TRAIN, I was the fool who dragged his family to a hot dusty parking lot, full of other disappointed, hot, cranky, desperate parents who were trying to salvage a “Magical Event” from this, if killed them.

It was at the train depot in Hood River. The actual depot was a fine old 1900ish stone building with charm and character. The Thomas the Tank Engine Evenk was set up in the parking lot next to it. It was 90 degrees and windy. The same wind that makes the windsurfing so amazing at this point, turned the staging area into a funnel of blown dust.

There was a big banner at the entrance that everyone took pics in front of.. We did too.

The web site told of a storytelling area. The storytelling area was inside a semi truck trailer, a sweltering box of metal in the blazing sun. Inside were some cheap plastic lawn chairs and a TV playing Thomas videos. Not even a box fan. The TV was out of the sun, but many of the chairs had to be in the sun, if you wanted to see the TV. There was supposed to be a live storyteller but when I poked my head into the trailer it was 5 minutes into live person’s time slot and they were not there. They may have been running late, due to the heat.

There were several tents set up with train related toys for the kids to play with, while waiting for their turn on the train. The tents kept off the sun, but it was at the end of the paved parking lot, in the path of the wind and dust tunnel. Spidermonkey wasn’t interested in them at all, so I cannot tell you much about them. Spidermonkey did enjoy the slide and other portable plastic kids play equipment, haphazardly placed around the area. He had a great time fishing plastic fish from a tiny wading pool with a magnetic hook. When they got a fish, they got a small prize. Spidermonkey liked his prize but enjoyed catching the toy fish more. He only stopped when other kids came up and we made him give up his fishing pole. There was a set of flimsy Mylar tunnels which would have been fun for a kid to climb through except the wind had blown it all into the corner of the hay bales containing it. There was a bouncy room totally dominated by older kids.

The kids could have their picture taken with Sir Topem Hat. Sir Topem was a pretty faithful 6 foot duplicate of Sir Topem Hat toy doll from the show, but the poor damned soul wearing the 200 lbs of foam and costume deserved hazard pay for being inside that oven in the heat. Kid after kid came up to take his black foam hand and get their picture taken. Sir Topem Hat moved the barest amount possible to reach the child’s hand and nod ever so slightly as if the slightest extra motion would induce heat stroke to the victim inside.

The biggest indoor area was, of course, the gift shop, filled with any thing at all that one could slap a Thomas illustration onto. Besides the obvious plastic toys and books, there were puzzles and shirts and tic-tac-toe games and calendars and sippy cups. One child had Thomas shoes, Thomas shorts, a Thomas shirt, Thomas sunglass and a tunic of Thomas, front and back, while holding a Thomas Mylar balloon and lugging a carton of Thomas toys. Looks like other parents were just as disappointed as I was; however, they were coping by buying everything in sight to make themselves feel better.

There was a petting zoo with goats, sheep and a llama. They were not calm placid cuddly animals, they were aggressive and scruffy. For a buck, we got an ice cream cone filled with goat food pellets. The animals shoved their heads through the fence, to devour the food pellets in Spidermonkey’s palm. They acted like they had never been fed before. First we gave them all the pellets and then fed the cone to the llama. The llama at the cone with an intensity that was rather scary. We only risked feeding them, we didn’t even try to go inside the fence to pet them. They would have knocked Spidermonkey over or worse. The company provided a hand washing station, which we used when we were done feeding them. The animals were probably fine but the entire time I was helping feed them, all I could think of was the news article of the kids who got e-coli from petting zoo animals.

There were 3 scruffy teenage boys with a hand crank ice shaver, grinding out snow cones at a $4 a shot for a large snow cone with lot’s of syrup. What a scam.

No real toilets, just a line of port-a-potties, baking in the full sun. They did have a netted off changing tent for the little ones, in the shade. That was a relief and very pleasant. They even provided an assortment of wipes and hand sanitizers.

And finally there was Thomas the Tank Engine, in the front of a worn set of scruffy train cars from the 20s. Thomas the Tank Engine looked great, all blue and black, his face in a grin. I could see he was just a mockup but he looked good. The real engine was at the rear. But the capper, the insult to injury, was that Thomas didn’t steam. The videos, Spidermonkey and I had found on the internet, of various stream trains had massive clouds of steam. I would have let slide the other disappointments, I could have salvaged this orgy of lameness, if Thomas had steamed grandly. However, their lame mockup was barely able to have a couple of anemic puffs of vague mist dribble from Thomas’s smoke stack, before it stopped completely. I was crushed but luckily Spidermonkey didn’t even notice or care.

The Thomas train left every hour for a half hour, out and back. The actual ride was nice, not great, but nice. We went out for about 10-15 minutes and then came back, retracting our tracks. I didn’t know that the sunny side of the train has the best view. We chose the shaded side, which turned out to mostly have a view of the passing dirt hillside. Over this all, was piped in a Thomas the Train musical soundtrack, somehow even more annoying than Disney’s “It’s a small world”. All ambient train sounds, like the clicking of the tracks, were obliterated by the insanely cute singing kids and orchestrations. We kept an eye on Spidermonkey and let him stick his head and body out the window and watch the train cars twist around tracks and see the landscape slide by at 20 miles an hour.

After the ride was over, the kids lined up and each got their pictures taken in front of Thomas. A professional took pics and it was ok for the parents to take their own pics. The professional groups pics are available to view and purchase via the web.

Spidermonkey took this all in, in a sort of detached but cheerful way. He was not constantly grinning from ear to ear like I had hoped, but neither was he crying his eyes out, like I feared. Overall, he had a good time, and he did enjoy the train ride and playing with the stuff and eating ice cream. And I learned a important lesson about parental expectations.