Choo Choo Barn and Canary Club . . .
Today started off slowly but turned out to be pretty busy.
Our first thing was give Stu & Donna McNicol a send off. They’re heading over to Maryland to visit relatives for awhile.
Later, around 12:30, Jan and I headed over to the Strasburg area just southeast of Lancaster to check out the area where we spent some time during the summer of 2009 while we were on our way out to Newfoundland.
We stayed at a Passport America in the area called Roamer’s Retreat, and it looks like it’s just as nice as it was three years ago.
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And the view from the park of the surrounding countryside looked just as good as before too.
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By now we were getting hungry so we headed over to a place we had eaten at three years ago and really liked. We didn’t remember the name, just where it was located. It turned out to be a Isaac’s Deli, a local chain.
And the food is just as good as we remembered. One item was a type of tomato soup. It turned out to be their Pepperjack Tomato. Closer to a bisque than a soup, it was delicious.
As were the sandwiches we had. Jan had the Shrike, with cranberry-almond chicken salad, melted provolone cheese, fresh tomatoes and sprouts. I had the similar Canary Club, with cranberry-almond chicken salad, provolone cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayo.
And our sandwiches were so big we both had leftovers. Nice.
Then for dessert, we split a slice of their Pumpkin Cranberry Stack, a spiced pumpkin cake kind of like a carrot cake. Really delicious, too.
After lunch Jan and I walked to the other end of the small group of stores to visit the Choo Choo Barn, a family-owned, 1700 sq. ft. O Gauge model railroad layout.
And this was a really neat layout. not only very detailed, but the lighting, and especially the animation, were just amazing.
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This is a zoo with many of the animals moving and making noises.
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A Flea Market
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This one is really amazing. It’s an Amish barn raising. And what this picture doesn’t show is all of the animated Amish guys on the roof hammering away, and guys on the ground sawing lumber. Really neat.
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And like the Entertrainment Junction we visited in Cincinnati a couple of weeks ago, this layout also has a night period to show off the many lighting effects.
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This animation has a guy flying a control line model airplane around the yard. The plane is the yellow shape in the middle of the picture.
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In the snow-covered mountain scene in the background here, the gondola goes up and down the mountain, and skiers ride the lift up and then ski back down.
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I think you’d have to go through this several times to even start to see all the neat things going on.
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Leaving the Choo Choo Barn, and heading home, we drove through the Red Caboose Motel, a motel made up of 41 cabooses, ah . . . caboosi, maybe. Anyway, there’s a bunch of them.
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And they even have a Pullman Dining Car to use as their motel restaurant.
A really neat place, and I bet, fun to stay at.
We finally got home just in time to turn around and head back out with Nick and Terry for supper. We ended up at the Cocoa Diner in Hershey, a place Nick and Terry had eaten before, and it was really good with a very big menu.
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Thought for the Day:
"I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him." – Galileo Galilei
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