At Fairmeadow, the entire fourth grade goes to Sacramento every year. I decided to chaperone the trip, and I have to say I was dreading it a bit. It was going to be a long day — we had to be at school at 6:00 am (!) and we wouldn’t return until after 5:00 pm. The drive alone is over two hours, usually longer on the way home. But, it turned out to be a pretty great day. I knew a few of the other moms who were chaperoning and the school rented very comfortable buses for us instead of school buses. Best of all, they allowed the kids to use screens on the drive, so it was pretty much the quietest field trip I’ve ever been on.
Ezra and I were grouped together with his best friend Henry (and Henry’s mom, Christina) along with four other kids. Here are the silly boys before we embarked on the trip — it was still dark outside.
We had some nice views of the sunrise from the bus, and even though my photo doesn’t do it justice (I wasn’t near a window), I’ll share it here.
Our first stop was the Capitol building.
While we waited for our official tour to start, we spent some time looking around the rotunda and the offices they have set up showing what they looked like historically.
Here are the kids in our group in front of Governor Brown’s office.
When our tour started (unfortunately with the worst tour guide ever!) we visited the museum-like offices first and then went upstairs to the Senate and Assembly chambers.
My favorite room was the office of the treasury, which included the coolest old safe.
After the tour we had a little down time outside where there was a great climbing tree (until one of the other moms deemed it unsafe and made all the kids get down).
Our next stop was Sutter’s Fort where we took a group shot of the whole class.
And then after a quick lunch, we toured the fort.
The last stop was the Railroad Museum where we saw lots of historic trains and railroad items.
These two goofballs seemed to have a pretty good time.
My favorite part was a recreation of the dining car on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line.
They had displays of all of the dishes they used on each line.
The boys really liked the enormous model train display.
And then we were done. One last shot of Ezra and Henry outside the museum before boarding the buses and heading home.