First Train Ride to City Museum

A friend that my wife and I knew from college decided that she wanted to give us her car. With a growing family and only a pick-up truck, a four door sedan was a welcomed gift. The catch was that this car was in St. Louis and we lived about 10 hours due North. I thought what a perfect opportunity to spend some quality time with my boy. We drove to Chicago and stayed the night at my grandmother-in-law's. I groggily dragged the two of us out of bed at 5:00 am to catch the commuter train down to Union Station in Chicago. Several weeks leading up to this day my son told everybody that would, or wouldn't listen that he was going to ride on two trains.

So there we were, surrounded by bleary-eyed business men and women at a dawn-soaked Glenview, IL train station. As the train approached, my son began to get really excited. I grabbed his booster seat and our backpacks while I thought of my wife as she lay in bed, asleep, with our infant daughter at her side. The steel doors opened and I stayed back to let the other commuters board first. As we stepped onto the train, I had the epiphany that this was going to be much more challenging than I had anticipated. In hindsight, I still had no inkling of the obstacles that lay on the horizon of our path.

My son froze when we got on the train. With his arms clutched tightly around my thigh, I dragged him and the increasingly awkward booster seat to the nearest empty seat on the train. I was an unassuming bear snared in the trap that was once my son. His iron grip slowly ebbed as the monotonous percussive song of the train eased him into a state of relaxed wonderment. The following twenty minutes were very peaceful as the two of us stared in awe at the growing buildings. It was at this point I should have realized that this was the calm before the storm.

My experience with trains is equal to that of my knowledge of nail polish; I've seen them, I've been near them, but I never, up to this point, was experienced in the ways of a train ride. In comparison to what was about to happen, I think a nice velvety shade of pink would've looked really nice on my nails.

We waded into the river of business attire, blackberries, and Ipods that was flowing off of the train. Everything seemed normal, until the acoustic blast of several diesel train engines running in a concrete cave violated my ears. My son was suddenly overstimulated and wanted to leave the situation any way possible. Here we are on eight foot wide platform with tons of people around, trains coming and going, and my son tries to run for it. I don't know where he was headed, but I somehow managed to snag his trailing wrist with a weak grip. I reeled him in as muted screams and tears escaped his face. It was so loud that I could only comfort him with a firm bear hug. I hastily made my way to the nearest set of stairs which led up onto the street. The awe of the massive buildings quelled the extreme agitation that was leaking out of both of us.

Getting on the Amtrak train was a breeze in comparison to the previous events. The seats were really comfy and without haste induced heavy swollen eyes for two weary travelers. We slept for several hours, albeit I was cautiously aware of the thirty-five pound weight that lay on my torso. After a snack and a half hour of watching a blur of cornfields and small towns, we began a marathon of train car walking. I stopped counting our ventures up and down the train after the fifth time. All in all, the ride was pretty easy. During the last hour and a half my son became rambunctious, but we found two mothers traveling with a child each in the dining car. That truly saved the rest of the ride from being pure torture.

After seven hours of being on a stuffy train, sitting in a car with the windows down was absolute bliss. The ride to our next destination was pleasantly short. My friend kept telling me that this place we were going to was really amazing. I was still dazed from the events of the morning when we pulled up to the City Museum.

For those of you who have never been to the City Museum, GO! It is simply amazing.

I couldn't believe what I was looking at as we crossed the court yard. Airplane fuselages, a fire truck, a school bus were all suspended above us in the mess of steel frame work and guide wires. I knew my son was walking next to me but I couldn't look at him because I was so over stimulated myself. Up to this point, my son had enough character building to last the rest of the year, but my inner-child was jolted awake to not care about his sensitivities. Everywhere you looked there was something that made you say, "WOW!"

We didn't know where to start. My friend took us to this hole in the floor and we started to follow, but when she vanished into darkness, my son just shook his head and backed out of the hole. There was a slide made from package rollers and I thought that would be a good place to start. He wasn't having any of that either. He spotted a tunnel that was identical to the kind you would find in a fast food restaurant play area. It was real short and innocent looking and I followed him in. Crawling along, you realize this thing is huge. The tunnels go on and on in every direction. We kept going straight until their was a split in the tunnels and a cargo net between the two. He just froze. I crawled over top of him and across the net explaining that if papa can climb across then he can too. This explanation did little to calm his emotions, which suddenly materialized into heavy tears. You see, the cargo net wasn't the problem. It was the fact that we were suspended about twenty feet over the floor below. I was trying to remain calm and I began looking around for something to distract him with. Just behind me was an intersection in the tubes and I backed up to find a kid just resting. I said, "Hey there's a kid over here."

"Really," said my son as he obliviously crawled across the net to inspect for himself. I realized the best thing I can do for him for the rest of the day is just be calm and act like a big kid. By playing in a few mellow areas for awhile, my son really relaxed and began to have a lot of fun. After some time, we headed to the outside portion of the museum, where they had the airplanes and fire engine suspended in the steel framework. The fun continued as we made our way up to the highest airplane. We were pilots flying rescue missions until we had to abandon the craft. At, by my guess, eighty feet above the ground we crawled out onto the steel cage enclosed wing. The cage extended off the wing at a steep climb to roughly fifteen feet higher and then arched back down over the court yard below. I just had to go up there. My son and my friend stayed playing on the plane while I ascended the swaying steel tunnel. As I lay on my belly at the top of the arch, flying across the court yard, I saw my son below me begin to crawl up into the tunnel. I sat up as he realized this was not what he wanted. He ran back to the fuselage only to be overwhelmed the urge to be near his papa. So back out to the end of the wing he ran. I was sitting there in the arch trying to let him figure this out, when a ghostly pale stole over his face and he dropped to one knee at the wingtip. I started to descend to my visibly shaken son as he vomited all over the wing. I was on him in the blink of an eye. "Are you okay," I asked to no response. It was as if he didn't even want to talk about it; the vertigo he just suffered. The three of us just moved on to play somewhere else.

The rest of our time there was filled with lots of laughter and joy. After four hours there, we were spent. It was time to go home. We caravaned all the way back to Chicago that night. My son rode in the new pick-up truck that was the pebble in the pond that began the days rippling events. While I sat alone in our new car staring out across the sleeping planes of central Illinois, I continuously reflected on the days events. My son had grown so much from this adventure. I had grown as a father. What would my wife think of all that her baby had to go through? It was an awesome experience that I can only hope is the first in a long line of bigger and greater adventures.