I was exhausted. Yet we were on our way somewhere else.
Friday night had been a wedding, Saturday a graduation party, both for wonderful people we know and love. But now, we were tired.
We were on our way to where my husband wanted to go for Father’s day. I didn’t bemoan him one minute; he is a great dad and deserved to go.
The driver in the car in front of us was texting. We watched her drive 30 in a 40mph zone, weaving back and forth. Then she decided she needed to turn right when she was in the left lane. After almost taking out the car beside her, she slammed on her brakes so she could get over and make her right.
After my husband had to slam on his brakes to avoid hitting her, I put my head in my hands.
“You ok?” he asked.
I looked up. “Yeah, I’m just so ready to get out of the city.”
We drove to the place my husband wanted to go, but when we got there it was packed full of people.
“I’ll just come back another day.” He said, as he headed for the exit.
“Are you sure?” I asked. This was Father’s day, and this is what he’d wanted to do.
“Yes. When it gets this busy I feel a little claustrophobic.”
I understood completely. Both of us have lived here our entire lives except for some time away as teenagers. We have watched as the fields that were once full of buffalo have turned into a place called Buffalo Corner with lots of stores and traffic. We are just ready to go somewhere else, somewhere quiet.
We were driving home, wondering what we would do for Father’s day now, when I saw it out of the corner of my eye. It looked so interesting. “What is that?”
“I don’t know, do you want to go check it out?” my husband asked.
“Sure.”
He turned around and we drove into the parking lot of a little cluster of old fashioned houses, with an old train car in the middle of it all.
When we walked into one of the buildings, there was a woman at the counter helping a couple. While she was busy, we were picking up brochures like crazy. She had all the different places we could go around our area to find hiking, farms, kayaking… Ect.
When she was done, she turned her attention to us.
We asked about the place and she told us it was an old demonstration farm. It was a place where they taught people from the city to raise chickens, so they could move to the country. The building we were standing in was an old general store/post office. The train outside was the Interurban Car 55 that was built in 1909 as a commuter service to encourage people to live in the country.
The building above the post office was a museum of the living quarters. They had created a replica of the furnishings from donations of the time period. It was absolutely beautiful up there. We came from a busy street into a different time period.
“This is so cool. We didn’t even know this was here.” I told the lady.
“No one knows we’re here. I have people stop in all the time saying they drive by every day and thought they should stop in to see what this is.” She replied.
She let us walk through the building, and then told us about the other buildings on the property. The train wasn’t open to walk through, but she told us when it would be.
After talking to her we walked around the property some more, just enjoying the peacefulness, the trees and the reminder of another, more peaceful time.
As we walked back to our car, refreshed, I exclaimed, “It’s like a little place in the country, in the middle of the city! Isn’t it so cool that we were just talking about wanting to be in the country and we saw this place that we didn’t even know was here?”
My husband agreed.
