Right across the street from the Sacramento Zoo is a charming little place called Fairytale Town. It is a children’s play park, more than just a playground. It spreads over two and a half acres and is full of themed buildings, animals, and play areas. The Crooked Mile sends you winding through the forest, three little pigs live in houses of straw, sticks, and brick, and Farmer Brown’s Barn has farm animals on the ground floor and a twisting slide on the second. It’s not really someplace for adults to go by themselves, but we never take the kids to the zoo without also spending an hour or two at Fairytale Town.
In the middle of July we took a break for a couple of days and went down the hill to Sacramento. Kind of a mistake to do that in the middle of July, when the city is at its hottest and most humid. But sometimes a change is good, even if it’s a change for the worse.
Our first day there we went to the Sacramento Zoo, always a favorite place for us and the Boyz.
Locomotive #18 used to run on the McCloud River Railroad in northern California. In 2005 it was bought by the Nevada Commission for the Reconstruction of the V&T Railway to run from Carson City to Virginia City, even though they didn’t have any tracks at the time. So they sent the engine to the Sierra Railroad in central California to hold onto it for them.
Finally last year, in 2009, the tracks were finished and the engine came to Carson City. But first there were some repairs that needed to be made before it could be used for regular service, and then this spring it was leased to a film company to be used in a Hollywood movie (Water For Elephants, coming to theaters in 2011). Now, at long last, the engine is back in Nevada and in good running order, and is ready to fulfill its purpose of hauling passengers along the Virginia and Truckee rails.
Today, July 24, 2010, was the first day the engine was in service. These are photos of the engine and passenger cars at the station.
I went to my friend Victoria’s house and took some portraits of her and her daughter Sara, and their friends, both human and furry. I think they turned out pretty well, but I still have some depth of field issues to work out. Gotta pay closer attention to my aperture!
I’ve had a number of camera phones over the years, and the pictures I’ve gotten from them have ranged from dismal to horrible to just plain crap. But now I have an iPhone 4, and they’ve actually made leaps that make this camera usable. It’s not just about the megapixels, which at 5MP might be a little too much for a sensor of this size. But it’s also the colors and the contrast that are so much better than any other camera phone I’ve had before.
As we go through this gallery you’ll see that the pictures aren’t perfect, and there could be at least 50 things you could point at where the camera falls short of my DSLR. There is graininess and muddiness, there is motion blur because the shutter isn’t quite fast enough in low light, and there are times the colors are still a little off. But this is still a huge leap forward, probably producing better pictures than the first Fuji I has 7 years ago. Now I can feel comfortable leaving my DSLR behind more often, knowing that I have a capable camera right in my pocket.
The 4th of July is always a big weekend at the Nevada State Railroad Museum. That’s when they pull their special collections out into the sunlight, like V&T Engine #22, “The Inyo”, one of the oldest running steam locomotives in the country. This year they have a new star to bring out, the McKeen Motor Car that they just spent 14 years fixing up. And they have other running locomotives, #25 and #8, although #8 has been down for repairs for a couple of years now. Saturday I went down to the museum and got pictures of all the various equipment they had on display.
