This picture is was taken after a frantic car-unloading session and mad dash to the train that was waiting on us. I was late to meet my friends at The Elegant Farmer to catch the East Troy electric train. You see, there’s a Bermuda Triangle that exists for me. It’s the highway system just south of Milwaukee. I’m generally on top of things when it comes to navigation. Ask any of my friends, they’ll confirm that I’d be a pretty good taxi driver. But I don’t travel on 894 very often, and when I do, I apparently drive around the entire city to get to East Troy.
But back to the adventure. I met four friends with their seven children (that makes 5 adults and 11 children total) and we hopped on the train. It started down the track and my kids sat wide-eyed because it was such a whirlwind getting boarded, that they didn’t really know what was happening. I spent the 15 minutes or so that it took to get to the East Troy Depot talking with my friend Kate who I hadn’t really seen all summer (how did it fly by so quickly?!).
When we got to the depot, we unloaded and set up shop outside on the lawn and ate each other’s packed lunches and ran around.
We ate cheese curds and ran some more. We had grand plans of touring the depot, but the kids preferred to run up and down the giant grassy hills. So unfortunately, I can’t tell you anything about the depot. Before we knew it, the train was heading back to The Elegant Farmer and we needed to try and snap a pic of all the kids.
Good effort, at least.
All sixteen of us got back on the train, after some confusion about purchasing tickets inside the depot while part of our crew snuck onto the train. I’ll say that it was much more expensive than I thought it would be, but luckily for me I had most of my kids under age three which made a difference. I guess the saving factor in the ticket price is that you can get unlimited rides all day. We didn’t have the luxury of having much time before naps/meltdowns, so it was just the one roundtrip ride for us.
I don’t have too many photos from the actual train ride because it was pretty hectic, as you can imagine with that many kids sharing like two seats. 
A nice gentleman attempted to bestow some knowledge upon us about the rich history and landscape, but 11 kids don’t really facilitate a good listening situation.
When we got back to the Elegant Farmer, we decided to splurge and get a treat for the kids because they were so awesome and it was summer. I went inside to get a few cookies while the kids played with sticks and looked for bugs and followed around the big kid of the group.
While I was inside, I drooled over these pies baked in a paper bag. If you get the chance, these pies are amazing. And their GIANT cookies aren’t bad either!
After saying goodbye to the next departing train, we studied some more bugs, had some serious face-to-face conversations (see second pic below) and hung out as long as we could before kids started to lose it.
The railroad has regularly schedule weekend trips through November 2, and offers special dining and holiday train rides as well. We’ll pair it up with an apple or pumpkin picking adventure at the Elegant Farmer next time, and skip naps so we can spend all day riding the train. I’m sure the conductors are looking forward to our return.
A. Storm
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