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| - When the Beautiful Carin and I lived back in the lovely Portland suburb of West Linn (what views from our house!...Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helen's, the Willamette River and southeast Portland spread out below us...King of the World views! :), we had a neighbor that had approx. 117 miles of toy train track in his backyard!
He spent tens of thousands of dollars building, repairing, maintaining and expanding his train set (or "layout" as he liked to call it).
It was incredible...there were waterfalls, forests, mountains, cities...you name it...he had created a tiny alternative America, based on his vision of where the trains should go and what America should look like from the train:)
He was completely crazy...in a very nice way...but crazy never the less (and the main reason that I never wanted my money in US Bank, where he was a corporate EVP:)
We've all known somebody like that...and we've all looked at their trains and said, "Ooh, cool!"...we thought they were nice, but "ooh, cool"?...even I didn't think the backyard trains were cool, and I'm not the coolest guy on the planet...Scottsdale, maybe, but not the whole planet:)
MSRRP is like that backyard layout in the hills south of Portland, but ever so greatly enhanced and beamed to Scottsdale, complete with big train sets, BBQ pits and pavilions, acres of grass and patios to lie around on and (currently), a little music to listen to on Sunday evenings!
In this case, however, the layout wasn't built by that nutty banker in Portland...it was built by the son of a banker from Manhattan, Guy Stillman (I'll presume that Guy wasn't nutty, for the sake of this review...but...train sets).
Guy inherited his money from the McCormick Farm Implements family (isn't it great to have more money than you can possibly spend...it really lets you do some interesting things:), and he donated the park property, trains, etc. to the Scottsdale Railroad and Mechanical Society for a park for the city, along with some dough to keep things up!
Over the years, the Scottsdale Railroad and Mechanical Society have managed to use those gifts to craft one of the nicest little parks anywhere!
The park is always clean and well kept...the people who manage the parks are wonderfully nice and efficient...they are always adding new attractions, and they have plenty of shady places to sit, as well as nice clean places to get a burger or hot dog and a cold soda or an ice cream sandwich:)
I will go so far as to suggest that MSRRP is where you want to be on a lazy, late spring Sunday night:
* Watching all the parents and kids play catch and dance to the music and run and ride around the park
* Watching the spontaneous bocce ball games break out over by one of the picnic pavilions
* Spreading out your blanket for a Sunday picnic supper on the acres of lush lawns that make up the entire park
* Listening to some really wonderful musical entertainment...for free...on the bandstand at the center of the park
* Drinking a nice Malbec, while you listen to the band play and chat with the people on the next blanket
* Looking up at the stars and letting the evening, the warmth, the comfort and the music wash over you
It's Americana, writ large...everything you think you want to remember about your youth is here...from the trains and acres of soft grass to run on, to the twilight picnic suppers and a band, playing up there on the bandstand in the middle of the park, helping you drift along on a wave of nostalgia.
A little more of the kind of entertainment and relaxation the MSRRP offers wouldn't hurt any of us:)
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