Field Day of the Past

We went to Field Day of the Past this weekend. For those of you who don't know, it's a bit 4H club, with a dash of State Fair, and a heavy helping of tractors. It comes every year to Goochland County and usually attracts 30,000+ people. We discovered that the trick is to arrive early. We got there around 8:30 and were one of the first few cars in the parking lot and had NO wait for the tractor ride to take us into the 50 acre old time farm extravaganza. As opposed to when we left, around noon, and there were at least 300 people in line for the tram ride in. Apparently, we were the worm catchers.

There was one pit that was simply an excavator, a couple of back hoes, some front end loaders and even an old Steam Shovel and all they did all weekend long was move dirt around. We sat and watched them for about 20 minutes as Sloan regaled anyone within earshot or his vast knowledge of Mike Mulligan, Marianne, and the inhabitants of Popperville. We also watched a couple of tractor pulls. And had to explain to Henry that lots of other engines made the "Choo Choo" noise and not every steam operating machine was a train.

Little Red Caboose. They had several Pullman cars and a caboose. Despite touring the train cars four times, there was still weeping and gnashing of teeth when we left the trains.

Until Henry got to ride a train of his own.

That's him in the blue hat. Being pulled by a trac-a-tor.

The corn box. Which leaving also left us in tears. But we didn't drive all that way for him to essentially play in a sandbox.

EEEY-OOON.

Henry got to sit on both a donkey and a mule. When you ask him what a donkey says, half of the time he sounds like a donkey, the other half, a police car in Europe.

Apparently this cowboy says "Hooray", "Yee-aw", "Get me up!"