Riding The Rails!

We got the chance to go to Cullinan, the mining town where they dug up on of the biggest diamonds from Africa, which now resides in the Queen of England's scepter.  Driving it would have taken us about 45 minutes, but instead we went by steam train and it took about two hours!   We were explaining to the kids that its about the journey...not the speed with which you get to your destination.

Charlie & the locomotive...

A special visitor came on the train with gifts!

A very enthusiastic Santa rode up front for most of the journey, people all along the route were waving and getting out of their cars to see the train pass.  We went through one township and the kids were running alongside the train.  We wished we had brought huge bags of candy to throw to them.  I may have written about them in the past, but the townships are the shadow black towns that remain from apartheid days, they are very, very poor areas where most people still live in corrugated steel boxes, without power and running water.  It's tough to be on a train full of well-off white people and go past the areas where people are living in such terrible conditions.  That is the part of South Africa that is really hard for myself and my soft-hearted kids, we want everyone here to have food, clothes, and shelter, maybe not on our American scale...
I have many experiences we have had with those less fortunate here and I'm not sure where to write about them, if I put them in the blog it would probably be too depressing for our readers!

We arrived in Cullinan and had a lovely lunch, checked out the playground full of old mine equipment, Charlie liked it, we also went in the few shops that were open (it was Sunday so most things were CLOSED).

Behind Greg & the kids is the "big hole" from the mining days...

South Africans have what we would consider some strange fashion tastes, people watching at a mall here is always entertaining...this teenage boy had the worst fashion sense we've seen..I had to take a photo..he is on the right walking with his Mom.

We had to get back to the train by a certain time so we wouldn't be stranded in the town with nothing open... so we got there early and had lots of laughs at this guy who was lounging in his front lawn directly across from the train station.  It looked like one of those postcards you see at a beach gift shop!  Hope it makes you laugh as much as we did...

On the ride home the kids learned about coal dust, they spun our train car around and we were now the car right behind the locomotive, by the time we got back we had coal dust everywhere!  

Charlie is very excited for Christmas, he never misses a day on his Advent calendar, he knows exactly what day it is.  He also told me the other day that he is going to be, "very busy after Christmas".  I replied, "Is that because you are going to Kindergarten?"  He said, "No, I'm going to be playing with all of my new toys from Santa!"   Silly me!  So if you need Charlie for anything, get him in the next few days before he's very busy!