Day Five

Where to begin, I guess the best place would be the beginning.  Today involved my most ambitious plans for the Summer of Fun to date ( I know it's been five days it isn't really much to compare to.)  But I decided that we would get up early and head out to the burbs for the Midsommar Festival (Swedish Days) in Geneva, IL.  I used to spend many days every summer with my grandparents at Swedish Days when I was a kid and I knew Meghan would enjoy it.  My grandmother grew up in Geneva and then lived one town away the rest of her life and I spent all of my summers out there.  (Swedish Days incidentally is one of the oldest if not the oldest of the summer festivals in Illinois.)  For us it meant a bus ride to downtown and then a peaceful train ride Geneva.  No traffic, no hassle and  the bulk of the festival activities were just down the block from the train station.  The weather threatened rain all day, but never rained, it was actually chilly but I'm never one to complain about cool weather.  We enjoyed shopping through the sidewalk sales and all of the kids activities on the County Courthouse Lawn.  We watched the kids' day parade.  We ate food from a food tent.  Then we headed for the carnival.  The carnival was hands down the highlight of the trip for Miss Meghan and I got a bargain, for $20 she got unlimited rides until 4pm and she's big enough and brave to go by herself all I had to do was watch and take pictures.  With one break for me at Starbucks, because port-a-potties are yucky and besides 3+ hours at a carnival definately called for coffee.  The biggest glitch in our day occured when the excitement got to Meghan and she pouted when it was time to go so we ended up missing the train I intended to take home.  We caught the next one by virtually running through town, I'm sure we were a sight, especially since she was wearing a viking helmet.  But we made it safely on to the train and were headed home after a great day, then two stops down the line the train lost power and we were stuck.  We stayed stuck for more than an hour, until the next train could come down the track, all of us could deboard and our train could be hooked up to the other train and be pushed into Chicago.  This required a monumental amount of patience and made our one hour train trip more than three hours long.  Which resulted in a lot of this:

14 hours after we left we got home.  It was dark we were tired but her highness still declared it a huge success and hopes we'll make Swedish Days an annual event.

Today's Academics:

• Learning all about patience when things don't go as they should.

Meghan's Current Book(s):

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling

Rachel's Current Book(s):

• Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage, by Gyles Brandreth

Today's Images: