Tiny Town

I took The Girl to Tiny Town today with a dear family friend. P is a woman that my mother has known since high school and I grew up with. She has always been much like a second mom to me and I love her. She was laid off from her job last year, which was, incidentally, the year before she planned to retire anyway. So she’s been relatively footloose and fancy free as of late and since The Boy went back to school we’ve been trying to figure out a time when The Girl and I could come and see her. In the midst of emailing back and forth, she mentioned going to Tiny Town, so we picked a date and today we went.

They have a small train that takes people around to see all of the buildings and from the moment we stepped foot in the place she only had eyes for the train. I got her interested in the small scale buildings occasionally, especially the ones where they got to crawl around the insides of the Colorado landmark re-creations. But mostly she spent the first hour we were there asking when she got to ride the train.

After our first train ride we decided to go to Morrison for lunch as the Tiny Town concession stand only had hot dogs and ice cream to offer and while that made The Girl one happy camper, P and I decided that we required more substantial nourishment than questionable porkbeefchickenonlygodknowswhatproductinacasing.

So we endured the worst service I’ve had in a very long time and we made our way back to Tiny Town for the promised second train ride and ice cream (which I ended up eating half of when she couldn’t keep up with the rate at which it was melting).

It was such a lovely day in all respects. And it brought such a smile to my face to have my daughter bonding with this woman who is such a hallmark of safety and affection in my memory and life. The Girl asked her to share a seat on the second train ride and they walked hand in hand back to our car.