Cross Country Lasers

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The title for this post seems totally misleading, but I promise it does make sense.



This week many public/charter schools in our area are closed for "Ski Week", and everyone disappears in search of snow. Most of our friends go to wonderful Tahoe, braving the awfully aggravating trafic on the way there and back.

The trouble is that Fae is now 3.5mo and much more self aware and opinionated. She is ok in the car seat on the way to get Mara from school and back, but anything past a 45 minutes nap definitely does not fit well in her schedule. We've tried convincing her with unappealing results - half hour of continuous screaming is not something we want to repeat often. She's such a sweet adorable baby most of the time!

In comes the Grand Plan that I've been stewing over for more than a year now: cross country train trip on the Zephyr train!

There's no car seat, it's technically a loooong moving house with gorgeous views, restaurant and sleeper car!

This is Day 1 of the 34h trip.

We had to wake up quite early to make it on time to Emeryville:
Gaius decided to sabotage all the photos, even though he was happily smiling every second off-camera.

Lunch was well awaited for and helped get our spirits even higher:
We already tested out the sleeper car during a nap, it works wonderfully!
And as promised, here's the explanation for the title:
Gaius has been kindly asking us to buy him a laser chess game for a few months now.
I finally got it last week, and he patiently waited for multiple days so we can open it on the train. So far we got several hours of play out of it, and loving the inherent optics lessons!
Here are the kids playing over the salt lake in Utah:
and Fae getting so excited about the box:
Looking forward to dinner!!

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