Last time I was on the Mountain, Mr. Cliff gave me four t-shirts and two auto-road passes.  Gramma Kay is visiting and one thing we wanted to do was take the kids to the Big Mountain.  Today was that day.

I brought my video camera from the office to record the trip up the road.  We left late, not getting to the mountain until 2:30, or so.  We drove up the road a little ways and pulled over in the shade to set up the camera.  I put the camera up through the sunroof with the tripod jammed between the front and back seats.  I sat in the middle of the backseat while Kay drove.

We drove on up the mountain, but the shot was only mountainside and sky with the road.  Not quite as good as I had thought.  We stopped at Hairpin turn and took some pictures there.  Then we drove on up to the summit.

As usual the summit was perfectly clear until we got there.  The 50 MPH wind was pretty strong, but we were in the lee so we didn’t get the full brunt until we got to the summit buildings.  I was videorecording Errol and he go blown down as he tried to walk on the tracks.  He almost got blown right off the mountain!

Everyone went up to TipTop House and then the summit itself.  Errol has enough and Kay, he and I went inside.  The girls didn’t see us go and were running around trying to find us.  The last place they looked was inside.

Errol and I went out to see the train that he loves so much.  We watched it go down the hill.  We went back to the summit marker and had our picture taken.  Kay wanted one of me and the kids.  It started raining so we went back inside.  Kay couldn’t go on the Obs tour, so we skipped that.  When it let up a little we went out and crushed a penny under the wheels of the next train and watched it go. We wandered around a bit more then headed back to the car.

I should have recorded the drive down because that’s where the gorgeous views are!  I’ll have to do it again.

The last time we did this someone said the Volvo was smoking.  We pulled over a few minutes from the bottom and sure enough, blue smoke was pouring out of the tail pipe!  I think that the 8 miles of engine-braking pulls oil into the cylinders.  It took about 2 miles to burn it off.

We went into Goreham for our traditional Italian meal.  That place is great.  I had Haddock Florentine.  They gave the kids some peanut butter candies and we bought some mini-Cannollis.  We got home at 9 PM.

What a nice day.