Cranberrys, trains, oh my!

We had a great time going to Edaville. One of my goals was to take Parker on a train ride and the other was to see a working cranberry field (harvest time). My original plan was to take a three hour drive to go on a 90 minute train ride. When some friends from our ward mentioned the Cranberry Festival we decided to go. Edaville provided the train ride (ride as much as you want) and the harvest of cranberry's we couldn't miss it.
There was a building where you could learn about the cranberry and close to this area was a childrens play area. We loved this set up. Willie and I took turns; one would learn about the cranberry while the other watched the kids play.
This machine was once used to pick up the cranberries.
This is the contraption that gathers the berries, it hooks on to the machine that drives around the fields.

Here are the boys playing in the Cranberry Ball Crawl. What great insight on the person who created this fun place. Parker was reluctant to get in at first.
We sat Lincoln in and he LOVED playing with the balls. He didn't like when he started sinking to the bottom.
Another way of entertainment for the kids was the train table. We figured out that Parker played with the Thomas trains for about an hour on his own. This kid LOVES trains.
Railroad time. We hopped aboard the Edaville express. Okay so it wasn't really fast but it was fun. I remember seeing the cranberry bog fields. Many of them hadn't been flooded yet. The leaves changing color were a highlight to my day. The train has some catchy tunes playing. Parker loves to sing 'take me out to the ballgame' and relates it to trains anytime that he sings it. He ALWAYS wants to ride on trains.Parker has fond memories of riding the train. He always asks to ride the train. He will even pull out 'ticket to ride' and play with the train pieces.
Parker really loves this video because you can hear 'Take Me Out To The Ball Game.' In the end I think it was the music that made this train memorable.
Willie and Lincoln are so excited to go on the train. I love their smiles.Here are a few picture that we have of the scenery, the locomotive, and me and Lincoln.Here comes the Edaville Train. Toot! Toot!

The fall season is fantastic for a train ride. I love the view behind Willie and Lincoln in this picture.Cranberries, oh how gorgeous. This was so much fun to see the cranberry fields getting harvested. Turns out there are only a few states that grow cranberries, Massachusetts is one of them. There are over 600 farms that produce cranberries in MA. Check out your Ocean Spray bottle, it was most likely made in MA.Lincoln fell asleep during part of our stay at Edaville. Parker was awake and entertaining so we have a lot of pictures of him. So here are a few.We tried a family photo. Lincoln stayed asleep the whole time. The small picture on the top in the middle is of a man who was harvesting the cranberries. It's fun to see the water turn pink, red, and white.This is a semi-dry field. It was getting prepped for flooding. We tried to get an up-close picture to show the cranberry. Lincoln finally woke up and we were able to get a couple of pictures of him. He was a happy kid, he always is.
Did you know you can pick out a good cranberry by bouncing it 7 times? The good berries have a great bounce to them. I wish I could remember some other fun facts, but I guess you could just google cranberry harvest. If you plan to stay in Boston longer than a week and during October, this would be a fun outing for a day.