Circle Line Rail "Cruise"

Here's a fun fact you may or may not know about me, I love trains, not in a trainspotter kind of way but I do love train journeys.

I wish there were more opportunities to make long train journeys in New Zealand, unfortunately at some point it seems that we decided that train travel wasn't for us and that people should get from A to B using the roads (although planes are now a lot cheaper and Rich and I use these over long car journeys whenever we can!).

However, from time to time we have a chance to take a train ride and an organisation out in Paekakariki offers historic train rides and we finally decided it was time to take a train ride!

We took this train just before Christmas and we had a very early start, leaving our flat before 6am on a Sunday to head out to Paekakariki to catch our train.

As the train journey was a little before Christmas, the train was decorated in Christmas theme and even the cute cafe in the train had some festive treats for sale.

One of the things I like about trains is that you get such a different view to the view you get when traveling in a car and some of the landscape looks so much more impressive! These photos were taken as we traveled through the Manawatu Gorge.

We also stopped at small towns that I would never normally visit - Pahiatua anyone? Population of around 4,000 in case you were wondering.

There were two options of a "final" destination (not really final as we had to travel back to Paekakariki) either a country fair or visiting a winery.

I don't drink, but we still chose the winery, it was the perfect place for a picnic in the vines (other people did actually go to the restaurant though).

It was also the perfect place to get a few photos of the train (and with the train!).

From here we headed back to Wellington, but there was another chance on the way home to stop for photos.

That's a very brief round up of our rail cruise, it was a lot of fun and I'm hoping I can do a few more of these in 2017.

USA Part Ten - A very long journey - including Eugene and Springfield

When we were booking our trip to the USA we decided we wanted to use the Amtrack as much as possible to travel as we both love trains.

We left Portland very early in the morning and the skies were already blue - our first stop was Eugene to catch up with our friend Schuyler and his wife Jenn who live in Eugene, Oregon. 

When we lived in Korea we hung out with Schuyler a lot - we spend a lot of Friday nights hanging out at the movies, going for dinner and just having fun times. It was so great to see him again and we loved seeing his home town Eugene as he used to talk about it a lot when  we lived in Korea and often said "If you ever come to Eugene I'll take you to XYZ...."

My favourite place that Schuyler and Jenn took us to in Eugene? It would have to be "Power Up" - I seriously wish we had one of these in Wellington. As you can see from the pictures about "Power Up" is part bar, part arcade and part cafe. We got to play all kinds of old school games (I played a lot of Pacman and pinball) including Rich's favourite the basket ball machine.

The other highlight of our visit to Schuyler and Jenn was visiting Springfield - yes! That Springfield.

After a fun day with old friends it was time to get on the train again, for a VERY long trip - from Eugene to San Fransico!

How stunning is the landscape through this part of the USA? Although it would have been cheaper to fly than take the train, I loved every part of this journey. We paid extra for a sleeper car so we could have some sleep. I loved the time we spent in Oregon, I think we will be back in the part of the world at some time for sure.