The Make-A-Wish foundation does undoubtedly amazing work, and sometimes the wishes they are asked to grant can be surprising.
Five year old Wisconsin boy Bentley Dodge's wish...to visit Nebraska and see trains in action in North Platte.
Bentley's dad Ryan tells 6 News, that his son loves trains more than anything. "We really don't know why he loves trains, but it started pretty young. From one-and-a-half to two years old. He just absolutely loves them."
It wasn't hard to come up with a plan when Bentley made his wish. He got a V.I.P. tour of Bailey Yard in North Platte.
"He's a really smart 5-year-old. So, he was really taking stuff in today. And, there's a lot of things that, just because we know him, when we play trains in the future, he's going to regurgitate a lot of the information he got today," Dodge said.
Ryan says the family has tracks running near their Wisconsin home. "We'll sit out there for hours and look at trains because he just loves them."
Whenever they're not watching real trains, they're playing with toy trains. "They're wooden and they're small and the tracks are smaller," explained Bentley.
Seeing one of the trains up close, Ryan says, wasn't even what impressed Bentley the most. "Where they fix the trains was pretty cool. he was on the platform and got to look over all of the trains, so, that was really fun to see. He was really digging that."
The best news of all is that things are looking good for Bentley. He was diagnosed with retinoblastoma last year after his family noticed he had some problems with his eye. "Even though he's gone through a lot, he's a really strong little 5-year-old. Even when he was going through the chemo, he was super happy," Dodge said.
That joy showed as he watched the trains. "I was thinking, "Woah, these are the kinds of trains I like,'" Bentley said.
(Photo courtesy of 6 News)