Fun with Munchkinhead Day 5

ohmygoodnesswhatacrazybusyday.  We had fun!

Munchkinhead and I took a day trip up to Sacramento today.  We took the choo choo train up, went to the Zoo, the Railroad Museum, the Historical Museum and the Capitol and met Mr. Trizzle for dinner.  According to Munchkinhead’s pedometer, we walked nearly 11 miles today.

Munchkinhead on the Capitol Cooridor with her train ticket, headed to Sacramento.

The Sacramento Zoo was pretty nice.  It felt fairly small, although it was much bigger than the Oakland Zoo, which Munchkinhead and I visited last time she was here.  Maybe the Milwaukee Zoo is just an outlier and we never realized it.  The Zoo had lots of African animals, which made me happy.  I love seeing Zebras (pronounced zed-bras) and giraffes.  And much to Munchkinhead’s delight, the Zoo had white-handed gibbons, just like her Gibby! 

The white-handed gibbon.

Much to Munchkinhead’s chagrin, the zoo also had its share of unenlightened parents.  There was the school group chaperone who, standing at the gibbon exhibit, told the school children to “look at the monkey.”  That sent Munchkinhead into quite a mumble for a good five minutes.  And there was the mother who failed to correct the small group of four-year olds who insisted the black and white lemurs were pandas.  After all this, and attempting to avoid stepping on the massive amounts of little people, Munchkinhead was so annoyed, she wouldn’t even play in the stick-your-head-here things with me.

Me as a butterfly.  This one would be great if the zoo map weren’t in the picture.

After the zoo, we got on the bus and headed back towards downtown to visit the State Railroad Museum.  It was awesome.  There was a huge display about the building of the transcontinental railroad, including letters, artifacts and dioramas reproducing some of the original equipment like snowsheds. 

It also had a large number of engines and cars on display, several of them open for walk-through.  I especially liked the displays about how the long-distance cars have changed over the years.  One exhibit features seats from different eras that guests can try out.   Munchkinhead also got to sit in the engineer’s seat of one of the last engines built by Rosie the Riveters.  The docent was such a sweetie (or off his rocker), telling us it may have been built by one of our great-grandmothers.

Munchkinhead and me in front of one of the display engines.

He may have been off about our great-grandmother’s building  trains.  But, the museum did have an artifact just like something our grandpa had.  In the model train display, there was a little man in a little shed with a little red door.  Grandpa had the same little man on his special train set that he’d put around the tree at Christmas.  We were very excited.

We discovered another museum next to the Railroad Museum, the Sacramento Historical Museum.  Admission was only $6, so we had to check that out, too.  It was about the founding of Sacramento, which was pretty much all about the gold rush.

When we finished up in Old Sacramento, we walked into the main downtown area to visit the State Capitol.  It’s a very beautiful and impressive building.  Munchkinhead loved the architectural and design details and kept taking pictures of banisters and lamps and such.

Munchkinhead in front of the Capitol. 

Behind the Capitol is an extensive garden area with a lot of memorials.  There’s a memorial garden that was started in the late 1800s to honor the Civil War soldiers.  Many of the trees in that grove were brought to California as saplings from Civil War battlefields.  There was memorial to all the firefighters from across the state who have died in the line of duty.  A memorial for Vietnam casualties.  A memorial for the first priest in the area.  And many, many more.  We took in our fill of memorials and monuments and then met Mr. Trizzle for our fill of food.

It was a wonderful and fun-filled day.  And now, we both dearly need some sleep. ;)