Yesterday at 4:45 PM my beautiful Bella friend and I decided to take our four boys on a train ride to San Mateo for pizza. Train ride are always a hit, and the two little ones hadn't napped and were not doing well just "playing nicely" in the home. Also, I love those rare chances we get to be spontaneous with our adventuring kids. So off we went to the train station.
We got on the wrong train. The express train does not stop in San Mateo. It goes nearly directly to San Francisco. Oddly, this ride was the time all four kids decided to be self-sufficiently interested in what they were doing, leaving Bella and I alone to discuss all the recent bottle excitement. She got carried away asking me about design, manufacturing, fulfillment and sales and I got full of the pleasure of talking about myself and what I was excited about with no interruption. Thus, when the conductor asked us where we were going and we said "San Mateo" and he said "you're going the wrong way" we shrugged him off. Not until a hip twenty something woman nearby said "seriously, you're in San Francisco" (which still prompted a defensive response from me ("Yah, um, we got it thanks") because I never think I'm wrong), did we look outside and see The Ballpark.
We jumped off the train at 22nd street (which requires more walking and climbing and overpasses to get back to the other direction tracks than any other station) and were lucky enough to catch a train headed back home five minutes later.
This time, now that the kids were thoroughly starving, we jumped on a train that was definitely not express. It stopped at Bayshore for ten minutes, and then at every other stop along the way. We calculated it would be 6:30 before we hit Menlo Park, and the littlest of the boys was screaming "food! food!" so we made a last minute decision and jumped off in Burlingame. Once off, we didn't think to check the train schedule so we'd know when to get back on. Or rather, we thought to but didn't. The boys were rather amenable to being dragged around town to look for a dinner spot and finally we settled on Il Fornaio for pizza plus WINE. Long story short we enjoyed our meal then missed the train after that meal, necessitating another hour long wait, which we spent in the Donut shop at the train station.
I got an apple fritter, quite possibly my favorite food in the world, and the kids got high on sugar, chocolate, and an old pinball machine in the corner. We arrived back home four hours after we started out on this little jaunt. Life with boys and trains and donuts is certainly a great adventure I wouldn't trade for anything (except maybe a nap once in a while).
No comments:
Post a Comment