The second weekend of December continued to be busy. My dear friend Jenny was celebrating her 40th and Tom had his first marathon!
In order to do both, Tom left for Sacramento early Saturday, taking a bus and then the train and dear Heather babysat the three kids later in the evening so that I could attend Jenny’s bday dinner at Soif Wine Bar.
Jenny and I have been running together regularly for going on a couple of years (??) now. Her son Kaden is exactly 7 days younger than Cameron and her daughter Julie is just a couple of months younger than Dylan.
Being such a good buddy, I didn’t want to miss her big milestone bday celebration. It was just too bad that Tom couldn’t join us! (Jenny, by the way, is the gal in red).
Equally important, though, was supporting Tom in his first marathon, so once dinner wrapped up, I picked up the kids from Heather’s and the 4 of us made the long journey to Sacramento.
Poor Tom had to be awakened from his slumber at about 11:30pm (when we arrived) so that he could help me haul the kids in–not ideal for someone needing to wake up at 5am for a 26.2 mile run!
It was freezing (mid 20F) as we were in the middle of the cold snap that hit in that first week of December! It was sooo cold, I was reluctant to take the kids to the finish line tooooo early. They had blankets to wrap around them and all but Cameron had heavy jackets (she refused to get one when we bought Dylan’s), but it was still so cold.
Instead, I bided some time with them having a hugely expensive breakfast in the hotel restaurant before finally deciding we needed to head out to meet Tom at the finish.
We were slowed by several stops along the way to adjust blankets and such (and poor Cameron was just so cold even with Tom’s jacket and blankets draped over her)! And……..we missed him! We were expecting a 4-hour finish, but he finished in 3:58, so by the time we got to the final stretch, he’d already crossed the finish line.
We spent the next 30-60 minutes trying to find each other….
In the meantime, I snapped a shot of the Capitol building. I hadn’t been back to this place since I attended a protest here way back in the 90’s! I tried to tell the kids that this was the state capitol, etc, but they were so cold, they really could care less (of course, warm weather may not have made much of a difference)!
After checking out of the hotel, Tom was still able to hobble around town with us so we checked out the historical downtown area which, happily, had The Most Awesome Train Museum ever.
This place had real trains and train cars inside!
We had to split up because Cameron was so unhappy from the cold and tired from the previous night’s lateness, that she initially didn’t want to go into the museum.
I found this Railroad Time blurb to be of particular interest. It turns out that timezones were a result of train operations needing a standard timetable for coordinating travel!
Another super interesting tidbit was that brewing coffee was a mandatory component of crew training! While Dylan and I were in the mail car, a docent explained how they used a steam valve to quickly heat canned food (and water for coffee). He described it as their “microwave”!
We did finally hook up with Cameron and Tom. We all went through the dining and sleepign cars together before heading upstairs to play with the toy trains for a few minutes.
Before heading home, we had a nice dinner and paused to watch a holiday light show.
There is actually quite a lot of interesting things to do in Sacto which leaves us something to look forward to–I think we will return here so that Tom can finish his “unfinished business” here! (He had a good marathon time, but apparently he bonked on mile 20 and walked much of the remaining 10k so he is hoping to improve on this next year!)
