This year my family traveled east to Bucks County to celebrate the holidays. Packing for a family of four and large dog for a week away is always a challenge, and when you add transporting all of our Christmas gifts on to that, it’s rather daunting. But it all worked out quite well. It certainly helps to have a roof carrier that the kids can’t see into at all!
Christmas morning was magical.
And we were delighted that my brother-in-law and father-in-law made the cross-state trek as well. 
Emma, my almost-8-year-old niece, is crazy about Jonas. Here she is encouraging him to come and play with her. And she was also crazy about this pink scarf, given to her by my sister.
Jonas liked the scarf too.
And Matt.
This might be the kids’ favorite part of Christmas (or any family gathering) – wrestle time with Uncle Matt! Here he is taking on FOUR kids at once.
It was quite cold for our whole visit, and that limited the possibilities of activities for us to do. We decided to visit Northlandz Railway in Flemington, New Jersey.
Northlandz is not like anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s an (oxymoron alert) enormous miniature railroad display. You follow a walkway for what seems like maybe a mile or so, looking in at display after display. There are enormous suspension bridges, tunnels, towns, cities, mining communities, a golf course… it goes on. And on. The Northlandz website offers some information about its history, but I’d be curious to know how many people worked on the setups, how long it took, and how much work is involved maintaining the display.
Apparently the owner of Northlandz, Bruce Williams Zaccagnino, is also a concert organist. Which explains the otherwise surprising organ theater in the middle of the display. After you’ve traveled through a bit of the display, you walk into a three-story theater with three large organs on a small stage as well as a couple player pianos. In addition to selling admission tickets and staffing the gift shop, Zaccagnino also periodically serenades visitors on one of his organs. You can hear a bit of him playing in the video clip below.
All photos (and video) taken with my Canon G9 point-and-shoot. Click the first photo for a less-than-one-minute video.
The control room
I do have a few suggestions for Northlandz, for what it’s worth. Certainly the scale of the display is impressive, and I can’t even begin to imagine all the hard work that went into creating it. So my ideas may be completely unrealistic, but here they are anyway.
- I think a little more diversity in the displays might be a nice change. Something futuristic, different seasons, different colors.It seemed like we saw very similar displays repeatedly.
- Warm it up! It was freezing in there. I left my jacket in the car, thinking I wouldn’t want to carry it around. I’m rarely cold, but this was one of those few times.
- This one shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone who knows my photography: lighting. Almost every display was lit only by a large overhead light source. Adding some spotlights would add more depth and dimension and give everything more impact.
- Ledges for kids to stand on. The website suggests bringing strollers for little ones, but I am certainly glad that instead I brought a sling for almost 2-year-old Jonas. If he’d been in a stroller, he would have been too low to see anything. Leo, who is almost 5 and one of the taller boys his age, was just barely tall enough to see. So of course he wanted to be lifted up a whole lot. It would have been helpful if there was something for him to stand on so he could get a better view.
After we finished the walking tour, we took a short ride on a steam train. Jonas looked pretty unsure, but he hung on, snuggled up to Pop Tony.
Another highlight of our trip was brunch at my sister and her husband’s house. I think if I had to pick only one meal to eat each day, it would be brunch. At least it would if they were cooking! We had pineapple, cantaloupe, chocolate banana bread (my favorite), baked French toast (my other favorite), pumpkin muffins, several different kinds of frittatas and sausage. And possibly something else that I can’t remember. Delicious!
We took on the challenging task of getting a full family picture while we had everyone together. It took a few attempts due to assorted unhappy young people. I may play around with combining different photos in Photoshop, but for now, this one is my favorite. (Big thanks to my sister’s sister-in-law Kari for taking the pictures!)
Jonas, doing that thing he does (charming the ladies)
The big kids were all playing hide and seek, and Jonas decided to give it a try, too.
Last one: Leo and Jake cuddled up together with Jake’s DS.
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