Our second Western tour for the book ended in Sacramento, CA, where the nation’s top trainiac museum, the California State Railroad Museum, invited us for two days of Harvey events. Our appearance coincided with the city’s annual Gold Rush Days. For this Labor Day weekend event, the streets in Old Sacramento–were the museum is located–are all covered with new/old dirt to simulate frontier life. There are also stagecoaches running up and down the street, people in period costumes and the occasional simulated gunfight. (One night at our hotel bar, we met two scruffy middle-aged guys who were drinking beers and watching football; Black Bart asked what they did for a living and they, literally, said “we’re gunfighters, ma’am.”)

Thanks to museum director Paul Hammond and his staff, we had a terrific time. On Saturday afternoon, they showed The Harvey Girls on a big screen in the auditorium, after which I took questions and told some of the odd saga of how it got to the screen. Then the museum debuted its “Rails and Reels: Hollywood, Trains And the Making of Motion Pictures” exhibit afterwards, and had a family of Harvey Girls (a mother and her lovely daughters, all wearing costumes the mom had made) serving finger foods from the Harvey recipes while I signed books.

The next day there was another showing of the movie, and then I gave a talk, followed by a signing. We met a number of extremely enthused Fredheads–in the bookstore before the talk and in the auditorium after.

Then we got a tour of the rest of the place–which really is extraordinary. Besides all the amazing engines (we loved the Southern Pacific double engine with the cab in the front), they have a fully-restored Pullman sleeping car that actually rocks like a real train, and it’s attached to one of the original Fred Harvey Santa Fe dining cars from the 1930s, The Cochiti, fully restored and also displaying an amazing array of rail china from different dining cars (I especially liked the rather oddly arty design from the Pennsylvania Railroad.)

While we were rail-china giddy, we were taken to the giftshop and shown something they only have there–since the shop sells the wonderful reproductions of Mary Colter’s Mimbreno china, and some of the pieces arrive broken, they send the pieces to this jeweler who makes them into bracelets, earrings and necklaces. We especially oogled a bracelet made out of Mimbreno fish–our favorite of the animal patterns. (We’ll register for it some day when we renew our vows; in fact we may just renew our vows for the china.)

We flew home on an ungodly-early morning nonstop on Labor Day, and the Tour de Fred II was completed. I’m scheduled to hit the road again October 13th, when I’ll start showing up in Texas and Oklahoma. More on that to come.

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