Chehalis-Centralia Railroad & Museum

Basically, Hyrum Loves trains.

All day long "I wanna go play train." meaning, he wants to go to the mall and play on the train by Target.

Or, he has out one or two sometimes even all 4 or 5 (however many he has now) of his train sets.

You are guranteed to find pieces of train tracks or trains out at any given time around the house, or piled in the seats of our car.

A week ago, Groupon had a deal going for $6 tickets to the Chehalis-Centralia Railroad & Museum to ride the train.

How could I pass that up?!

I figured Hyrum would have a cow and absolutley love it, so Ricky and I decided to buy 6 tickets. I purchased 3 on Rickys account and 3 on mine.

The museum is open and does train rides ever Saturday/Sunday starting Memorial Day weekend up until the last weekend of September.

They also run a Halloween event on the Train, as well as for Easter, Christmas/and a Polar Express ride, and a few Dinner train rides, along with dinner/murder mystery rides.

The 'train' that pulls the coaches for the ride is a '1916-vintage steam locomotive'

one of few left.

We decided not to make Hyrum wait too long before being able to use some tickets to ride the train so we decided to use Memorial Day weekend to put use to 1 set of our tickets. (we have 2 sets left!)

As we thought he would.... He loved it!

Once we got on the road to head back to Federal Way all we hear was "I go drive train, I go drive train, I go drive train." without a single pause or bit of hesitation between each..

Luckily after eating a late lunch and getting on the road for good, he went to sleep for the rest of the drive home.

It wasn't one of the nicest days out, but it wasn't horrible either. It didn't rain on us, it was cool, but not too cool.

The ride its self seemed to fly by fairly fast. It didn't seem long and drawn out and we were not 'dieing' to get off at the end.

I'd say it was just right. The ride itself it about an hour round trip, and I know one little boy who would have loved for it to last much longer.

We have tickets enough to go ride the train two more times but I think we may give a set away or bring some people with us for the next trip.

I took pictures of our little adventure, and when uploading them to my computer I decided I'd try out a new free photo editing program that I downloaded a month or two ago and have not used yet.

I've never really sat down and edited or changed any pictures I've taken other than the typical 'crop' here and there.

I have posted some of the photos here that I played around with in the editing program. I ended up having lots of fun with it and am pretty sure I am going to use it a lot more now!

If you are wondering the program I have and used is called PhotoScape v3.5.

You can check it out and download it at photoscape.org.

In the photo block below you can compare the changes I made to the pictures in the editing program to the originals.. I, myself, think they look pretty neat.. I had lots of fun experimenting with these!!