We have just returned from Soda Springs and spending some time with mother and dad. It’s been a fairly cold day and snow was coming down when we left Soda Springs to come back to Pocatello. Today was also Train Day. Union Pacific’s big 844 Steam Engine was coming through the area and would be spending the night in Pocatello. The train was supposed to arrive at 2:30 and the web site said that the train often ran early. But, wonders of technology, the train has a global positioning system onboard and the railroad has an interactive map that shows the location of the train. At 2 p.m. the train was still in Wyoming and was running at least 3 hours late. Since we were planning to drive to Soda Springs after watching the train, we decided to go first to Soda Springs and watch the train come through there instead. It worked out well. We arrived at mother’s house, checked the web site, and waited until the train was about twenty minutes away. We drove downtown and got (hopefully) some great pictures of the train coming into town.

Since it’s spending the night in Pocatello and leaving tomorrow morning, we decided to go find the train after we got back to Pocatello. We found we could drive right up to it and walk all around the train. That engine is absolutely massive. We took a few more pictures and will be there in the morning when the train leaves to take more. Since I don’t have a digital camera right now, I went back to my older Minolta Maxxum 9 SLR film camera. It’s been perhaps a couple of years since I’ve used that camera and I’ve now opened the body twice before the film rewound. It’s a good thing there’s still more opportunities to take pictures of the train!

I’ve finally gotten the rest of the pictures in the picture album from my trip to Manila as well as Stephanie’s birthday. In addition, I took a little bit of video from Danielle’s International Children’s Choir concert. It’s about 33mb large, which isn’t too bad. You can watch the video by clicking here.