Why Train Travel Is Better

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and subtle insinuations of mild sensuality.

Introduction

 Six years ago I blogged (here, here, and here) about my family’s trip on Amtrak from the Bay Area to Chicago.  Well, we’re at it again.  I’m typing away from the observation car as the train makes its way through the mountains east of Grand Junction, Colorado.  Our destination this time is Denver.

(As far as you know I posted this after the fact and/or we’re flying straight home from there so by the time you read this it will be too late to burglarize our home.  Or maybe not … maybe this is the beginning of a long vacation, in which case you’re welcome to try to steal our sentimentally valuable but commercially useless family heirlooms, though you’ll have to deal with our psychotic gun-nut house-sitter and his meth-fueled pit bull, who never knew his father.)

Having tackled the overall train travel experience in my previous posts, today I’m going to give you the top 10 reasons why train travel is the best way to go. 

Reason #1:  Train travel is novel

Train travel is novel.  Flying has become as routine as taking a bus, more so actually, as has driving, and both activities get old pretty quickly (unless you’re driving on a cool highway like US 50).  And on the train if you get tired of your coach seat or sleeper car berth, you can mosey on up to the observation deck, or down to the lounge, and at mealtime you get to sit in the dining car (and actually, the Amtrak food is pretty darn good).  At bedtime if you’re in a sleeper you fold down one bed from above and turn the seats into another bed, which is really fun for kids (I think this gave my younger daughter goose bumps the first time).

The train stops from time to time, in places more rustic and less bland than the convenience stores along an interstate.  You can step off the train for a little fresh air.

Reason #2:  Flashers

Also, if you take the California Zephyr route you’ll cruise along the Truckee and Colorado rivers, where there are lots of rafters, and your chances of being mooned or flashed are very high.  It’s a long-standing tradition, apparently, for young men to moon the train, or young women to pull up their shirts or bikini tops for the benefit of Amtrak sightseers.  When my brother took his kids on this train back in ’05 they were flashed by rafters, as was my wife in ’06 (while my head was, alas, turned the wrong way).  And while I was sitting here peering into my laptop just now, a rafter flashed the passengers to my right.  I’m so bummed to have missed that.  Serves me right for writing this instead of just gazing out the window and watching life go by.  I hope you’re happy.

Reason #3:  Better for the planet

Wikipedia reckons that “a train seems to be on average 20 times more efficient than automobile for transportation of passengers, if we consider energy spent per passenger-km.”  They base this on an assumption of the car getting 39 mpg, which is far better than most cars get, especially with a bunch of luggage and/or bikes fastened to the roof rack.  In contrast, Wikipedia estimates that a passenger train gets 468 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.

I’m not sure how Wikipedia gets their “20 times more efficient” figure because they don’t show their work.  My Volvo gets about 28 mpg on the highway, so with 4 passengers that’s 28*4 = 112 passenger-miles per gallon, which—compared to the train’s 468 passenger-miles/gallon—makes the train look only 4.2 times as efficient as a fully-loaded automobile.  I’m not going to ponder this disparity at length, because I’m more interested in comparing a train to a plane.

Wikipedia estimates that an Airbus 380 (the dumpy plane most of us tend to fly) gets 78 passenger-miles per gallon.  That means the train is 6 times more efficient (per passenger) than the plane. On top of that, the plane is polluting up in the atmosphere where the emissions do the most damage.  The so-called “climatic forcing” effect of jet aircraft means that although “per passenger a typical economy-class New York to Los Angeles round trip produces about 715 kg (1,574 lb) of CO2,” this is “equivalent to 1,917 kg (4,230 lb) of CO2.”  That is, the fact of the aircraft emissions being high in the atmosphere increases the environmental damage by a factor of 2.7.  So the train is actually about 16 times less bad for the environment than a plane.  In other words, for the environmental cost of one family vacation involving air travel, we could take 16 train trips of equal length.

If these numbers start to make your head swim or your eyes glaze over, here’s a more interesting way to express the efficiency of trains:  in 2007 a man dragged a 7-coach train weighing almost 300 tons along its track for more than 9 feet, using his teeth.  This is possible because the steel-on-steel interface between the train wheels and the track incurs so little friction.  (You think that guy could lift even a small single-engine aircraft off the ground with his teeth?)

A final environmental consideration:  the benefit of your choice doesn’t end with your train trip.  Amtrak pays freight train companies for the use of their tracks, so by supporting Amtrak you’re also supporting the railroad freight industry, which is far greener than long haul trucking.

Reason #4:  Can be cheaper

If you can tolerate coach class—where the seats are way bigger than an airplane’s, by the way, with far more legroom—Amtrak can be very inexpensive.  I’m sharing a table in this observation car with an lady who is traveling from Winnemucca, NV to some town just outside Chicago for under $280, round-trip.  The gal across the aisle is going from the Bay Area to Denver and the total tab, one-way, is $222 … which covers herself and her two kids.  (Full disclosure:  this was her original cost, but a couple days before her trip, Amtrak ran a special on the sleeper car so she upgraded for “not much money.”)

The sleeper car is generally a lot more expensive than coach, but I sprung for the sleeper car because this is our big vacation for the year.  It was worth paying extra just to be able to tell my kids, “We’re livin’ large as possible, posse unstoppable, style topical, vividly optical.”  I can’t make this boast with air travel because first class there is way too much money to even consider, and the seats are still smaller than even the coach seats on Amtrak.  (Each seat in the sleeper cabin is wide enough for two.)

Reason #5:  None of the airline bullshit!

I hate flying.  Going through the security check, and having to take off my shoes (even though the one guy who tried to smuggle explosives in his shoe got caught), and having to drink up or forfeit my water, and let some guy pat me down so closely I expect him to ask for my phone number afterward, and then having to take my bag over to some table where somebody runs a little cloth swab all over it to check for explosives—as if!—and then, once I’m finally on the plane, being deprived of legroom, food, even peanuts, and invariably being seated right above the wing with the jet engine shrieking in my ear, and having the baggage policy get ever stingier practically every time I fly, and being asked to pay—get this—$150 each way to bring my 17-pound bicycle on the plane … it’s all just such bullshit I can’t even describe it without the “-shit” part.  I tried to use “BS” but it just wasn’t enough.

On Amtrak, there is no security check.  None.  I mean, what are you going to do, hijack the train and make them take you to the Flagstaff, AZ station instead of Denver?  The Amtrak process is so simple:  you make your reservation, print out your single sheet of paper which serves as the boarding pass for your whole family, show up at the station 45 minutes in advance (no check-in required), and bring practically as many bags as you want, for free, and take them right to the train where you’ll have access to them the whole trip and never have to wait for them to come off the carousel.

And you know what?  If you’re not that organized, and you get a late start riding bikes to the station with your teenage daughter, and if Google Maps totally screws you by leading you not to the station but to a barren place across the tracks and more importantly across a giant fence from the station, so you have to spend an extra ten minutes racing around on surface streets, you can literally roll up with your bike less than 15 minutes before the train leaves.  At least, my daughter and I did, and incurred only a very mild, brief tongue-lashing at the ticket counter, where I paid $10 each to take our bikes on the train.  And the bikes, un-boxed (because Amtrak had run out of boxes), didn’t have to go through some system of conveyor belts like at an airport, which present some danger to the bikes, which danger the airlines—being dicks about this, like everything—accept no liability for.  I put the bikes on a luggage cart, and the conductor said they’d just be leaned on a wall and lashed down.  Simple.

Reason #6:  Less stressful than driving

Driving is a leading cause of accidental death.  Even if you’re the best driver ever, you’re sharing the road with drunks, and irresponsible young men who think driving fast is a game, and drivers who just plain suck.  And you have no control over the weather, which can turn your road trip into a nightmare.

With a train, you’re responsible for  getting yourself to the station and that’s about it.  Then you can read, sleep, look out the window, play a board game, blog, or take advantage of the seventh reason why trains are better.

Reason #7:  Friendly fellow passengers

It is technically possible to have a good conversation on an airplane with a fellow passenger, but highly unlikely.  First of all, your only opportunity is with the person in the next seat, vs. wandering around a train with the opportunity to chat up anybody who seems friendly.  Second, most air travelers are too angry, too tense, and/or (if they’re on business) too preoccupied to want to chat.  In my experience, everybody in the Amtrak observation car is there to soak up the view and relax.  I’ve conversed with several friendly passengers today.

Conversely, if you don’t feel like chatting, you don’t have to be rude to the person in the (assigned airline) seat next to you who keeps asking what you’re reading instead of letting you read.  On a train, you can just return to your seat, or into your sleeper car where you can close the curtain and/or door.

Now, if you’re sharing an automobile with your favorite people, of course you can chat with them, but only to a point.  If you’re the one driving, you shouldn’t get too caught up in the conversation or you’ll become that “distracted driver” that is such a menace to society.  (Once, at the end of a 6-hour drive, I missed the exit to my mom’s town because I was so caught up in reciting the poem “Kill My Landlord.”)  If you’re not driving, you need to take care to not distract the driver too much.  And you can’t have a good conversation with your kids because they’re too busy fighting in the backseat, and dispensing toilet paper out the window to make comets, and fussing, and squirming, and asking, “Are we there yet?”  On the train you can split them up, banish them to their sleeping room, or tell them to go pester the conductor about the ETA.

Reason #8:  Better scenery

The view from the tiny plastic airplane window is okay during takeoff and landing, but once you’re at cruising altitude you’re usually too far up to see much.  Occasionally the pilot will get on the PA and say, “Those of you on the right side of the aircraft can see the Grand Canyon down there … looks a little like a cracked lip.”  Often there’s cloud cover below the plane so you can’t see anything at all.

The view from an automobile is better, but you still don’t see as much.  Train tracks sometimes go through places that don’t have roads.  I’ve been looking out at the Colorado River and the gorge it winds through, and it’s pretty impressive.  The tracks go through less developed areas so the landscape is often especially impressive.

Right now the train is threading its way between Routt National Forest and Arapaho National Forest, near the towns of Kremmling, Heeny, and Sheephorn.  Have you heard of these places?  Of course not, and that’s the point.  (“I used to live in Kremmling,” a friendly fellow passenger just piped up, having perhaps read that over my shoulder.  “One saloon and one cabin.”)

Even familiar scenery can be completely changed by the unique vantage point of the train.  I’ve seen the Carquinez Bridge hundreds of times, but never from below, as I did yesterday.

There are even volunteer docents on some stretches, who will give you history about an area (such as the gold country or the gorge we’re going through now).  They don’t just drone on either; they’re pretty funny.  “Look at that white thing way up on the bank there—that’s a Suburban,” one just said.  “That’s a teenager’s driving lesson.”

You also get to see cooler animals via the train.  On this trip my family has seen antelope; prairie dogs; some strange animal we’re calling a desert badger; a jackrabbit; mule deer; and even a T-Rex scarfing baby Ewoks like they were croutons.  (I made that last bit up to see if you’re still awake.)  Some animals seem curious about the train whereas no living creature has any interest in cars (except certain humans).

On top of all this, you’re not going that fast on the train, so you get a better look at everything.  (And you still get where you’re going sooner than a car because the train doesn’t stop for the night.)

Reason #9:  Don’t have to look at people

There comes a time during a conventional voyage when you get so bored, you may be unable to resist looking at other people.  How often have you been on a 6-hour flight and you get so stir-crazy you decide to head over to the lavatory, even though you know there’ll be a line, and you stand there looking out over all the other bored, irritated people, packed in like cattle, and you just hate them all?  Or you’re so bored during a drive that you start to look at every driver you pass, and in every single case they’re looking back at you, and you’re both thinking, “What are you lookin’ it?!” and it’s just kind of creepy?

I guess if the answer to those (albeit rhetorical) questions is “No,” then you’re a better person than I am, and you can have your boring interstate highways and jam-packed airplanes.  For me, boredom just isn’t a problem on a train, and there’s so much to look at, and everybody looks better to me because, like them, I’m so much more cheerful.

Reason #10:  No deep vein thrombosis or perforated eardrums

Okay, I’ll concede that deep vein thrombosis isn’t exactly an epidemic.  It’s the rare person who, due to being too cramped and still for too long, suffers a blood clot that moves through his/her system and causes a pulmonary embolism.  But it can happen.  What if you got one and died on a plane or in your car?  Wouldn’t that be a rotten way to go?  (“He died as he lived … stuck in coach” or “He didn’t die alone … his car veered over several lanes and took out a school bus.”)

Meanwhile, train travel is easier on your ears.  The pressure changes on a train are very gradual.  As you cross the Continental Divide, you might notice the foil on a single-serving coffee creamer start to bulge, but you won’t feel much in your ears.  This train is at over 7,000 feet elevation right now and I’ve barely felt a thing.  Airplanes are different.  Cabin pressure is at cruising altitude is equivalent to 5,000 feet of elevation, and can decrease to zero in a matter of minutes when you land.  Once, I had a minor cold resulting in a clogged Eustachian tube, so when the plane descended I suffered a perforated eardrum.  This was absolutely excruciating and turned my ear into a geyser of blood and pus for several days, and required several follow-up visits with a doctor.

Bonus Reason:  Hand-to-hand combat

If you try to give somebody a real beat-down in the aisle of a passenger jet, you’ll probably get arrested when you land.  And an automobile is just too confined a space for a good fistfight—your elbows keep hitting things.  The sleeping cabin of a train, however, is private and spacious.  I could hear my daughters going at it from across the aisle.  They don’t pack a good punch, those girls, so neither was injured, but I think they had a good, satisfying tussle.

This was confirmed when I interviewed my daughters for this post.  Among the reasons my older daughter gave for preferring train travel was “Can finally fight it out with your sister once and for all.”  She even admitted that she was fantasizing a bit about being James Bond, who never boarded a train without having one final battle with this or that nemesis.  (And for the record, upon reading over my shoulder just now, she has assured me that she was pulling her punches and actually could have done serious damage.  Maybe on the way home?)

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Train Trip - Part Three

NOTE: This post is rated PG for mild potty talk.

Introduction

If the “part three” in the title of this post hasn’t tipped you off, I’ll tell you now this post is part of a series. I’m trying to mimic the wild success of the various series that everybody seems to like so well: the Harry Potter books, the Star Wars movies, etc. I guess when a series is upscale it’s called a “cycle.” Yeah, that’s it. The albertnet train trip cycle!

There’s a bit of a chronology problem here: I meant to post this a day or two ago but didn’t have Internet access. So this post leaves off with Flagstaff, Arizona, even though I’m in Los Angeles now, on the final day of the trip, in a hotel lobby. (Lousy music is playing here. Were I a dictator, I would ban songs in which the singer repeats the chorus more than 100 times total and/or 10 times in a row. A bit ago some countryesque wailer did “I want it back” ad infinitum and then a male “vocalist” repeated “This is the time” endlessly.) There’s not too much to say that’s train-related about L.A., other than we spent about 3½ hours on a bus yesterday getting to and from Santa Monica. Excellent people-watching and we didn’t have to park.

Scenery – part one

Once we went from Kansas into Colorado—from Central to Mountain time—it was as though the Midwest ended and the West began, in the span of just a few miles. The landscape went from tamed, orderly, and irrigated to scrubby, varied, and wild. We also went from largely 2-D to 3-D: hills and mountains began to appear as we made our way across Colorado and New Mexico. I imagine all that farmland gives a feeling of comfort to a Midwesterner, but the rugged Western landscape better captures my imagination. It’s the last land to be settled, and yet feels older; little towns look stuck in time. I’m reminded of the many road trips I’ve taken between California and Colorado with family or college buddies, and how enjoyable they were: singing along with the stereo, no A/C, windows rolled down, flying my hand out the window and feeling the burning wind against it, my back stuck to the seat with sweat. This next generation will be missing out as the A/C-less cars go gradually extinct.

It’s tempting to say it would be nice to open the window of the train. In reality that might mean a lot of diesel smoke or something. And I have to say, the air in the train—though it can get stale due to the A/C—is a fair bit more comfortable than suffering through the heat we’ve passed through. I hopped off the train the other evening somewhere in Iowa and was hit by this massive wall of damp heat, just like a steam room. I gave a gasp of astonishment and several of my fellow passengers (smokers, mostly) chuckled with recognition. This train—the Southwest Chief, which follows a more southern route than the California Zephyr we went east on—goes through such places as Needles, California which is said to have some of the highest temperatures in the world. Erin had lunch in Needles once when it was 120 degrees out.

We just came upon the most gorgeous cloud I’ve seen in over sixteen years (that is, since the last time I was in New Mexico):

Train architecture – part one

Our family sleeping room spans the whole width of the front of a sleeper car, so there’s a window on either side. A narrow hallway runs down the middle of this car, with smaller sleepers on both sides. These smaller sleeping rooms consist of two seats facing each other; the lower folds into a bed and a bunk swings down from above. Two people sharing such a car better get along, because they’re facing each other all day long. Toward the end of the hallway is where all the carry-on baggage goes. Across from this is the door through which you enter and exit the train, and next to this a very narrow stairwell with a couple of 90-degree bends in it. Upstairs are more sleeper cars; there’s a very narrow, low hallway on one side, with windows a child can see out of but not an adult (they’re too low). As the train lurches from side to side it’s a trick not to slam into the outer wall or—worse—fall through a curtain into somebody’s sleeping compartment.

To go from one car to another you have to go upstairs. This is where the doors are between cars. There’s a no-man’s land between cars with intimidating sliding plates for a floor and manifolds protecting you from the elements and, I suppose, from jumping. (When it’s really hot and humid, you get a taste of the air outside the train.) The doors to and from this in-between space are electric, with a large rectangular steel button you press to open the door. There’s another door-opening button at foot level; when I showed this to the kids there began a constant battle over whose turn it is to open the doors as we make our way along.

Lindsay kicks this door button with real attitude: six years old going on teenager. She strides along, sucking her two sucky-fingers, and boots that button as if kicking a yapping dog out of the way (though of course she’d never kick a dog). I’ve tried to tell her just to push on the button, but it’s useless. There’s nothing definably wrong with her technique, just like my music teacher in elementary school couldn’t discipline me for my singing manner. (I had an over-the-top enthusiasm that was clearly insincere, but not in any way the teacher could nail me for. How do you send a kid to the office for singing ironically?)

Situation room – part one

When it comes to public restrooms, I think it’s safe to say most adults will get through their business as quickly as possible. These places are a necessary evil. But kids find fascination wherever they go, and this is no exception. Lindsay is just learning to read and makes her way through every placard, sign, and logo she comes across. She’s not comfortable flying solo in a train restroom so I’ve had to crowd in there with her on several occasions. The worst was when we both had to do serious downloads, while Alexa was waiting outside to be escorted back to our seats.

As I prepared the ring-shaped paper toilet seat liner, carefully tearing at the perforated points, idly wondering why train and airline bathrooms use the same liners as other public toilets, with the same paper tongue that is supposed to reach the water in the bowl and thus secure the ring, even though the water level is nowhere nearly high enough with a train toilet to reach the paper tongue, Lindsay asked (in her own words) for a full etymological exegesis on the brand name “Rest Assured.” It’s not easy to explain branding to a child. I don’t really know what these toilet seat liners actually assure us of. They’re really just protecting us from an unsavory idea, when it comes right down to it. (If this entire discussion makes you uncomfortable, I suggest you avoid the next few paragraphs and skip ahead to the section titled “Train architecture – part two.”)

Lindsay had a leisurely time of it, pausing in her business to lean forward and try to read a placard on a trash compartment door that said, “Used Diapers & Sanitary Napkins.” That first word, “Used,” is pretty tricky when you think about it, and the others were even harder. I read the placard for her, exhorted her to hurry up, then had to explain what a sanitary napkin is. There is no A/C in the restroom, and no ventilation.

While Lindsay enjoyed her session, I idly looked more at the trash compartment and discovered that although it had two little spring-loaded doors—the one I mentioned already and another next to it reading “Trash”—they both led to the same receptacle. I had to wonder exactly why they did this split-door arrangement. Are there lots of passengers whose need for order includes segregating their normal, minimally grody trash from diapers and sanitary napkins? And among these compulsive neat-freaks, is there a significant subset that fails to notice that the split-trash system is just a sham? (Amtrak’s catering to a tiny subset of the population reminded of the TV screens that used to hang in Bart subway stations with written statements like “Watch the gap” that were translated, in a picture-in-picture arrangement, into sign language. You know, for those deaf illiterate people.)

Relieving herself must give Lindsay a strong feeling of well-being. Halfway through wiping, in the midst of a toilet paper inspection, she said, “I love you so much.” Such timing. “Uh, you are talking to me, aren’t you?” I said. Nonplussed, she said of course she was. The heat and fumes were really getting to me. Alexa was restless outside, telling us to hurry up. According to the slow choreography the situation demanded, Lindsay and I switched places and she showered the restroom with ricocheted water from the hydrant-like sink spigot while I unburdened my own overfed body in the much-abused commode. Finally done, I washed my hands before flushing, so I could plug my ears with clean hands during the flush. (Like a passenger jet, these train toilets have the loudest, most violent flush you could possibly imagine, seemingly capable of tearing a man’s toupee off and greedily swallowing it.)

Alas, the jet of water was too directional to completely clean the bowl. It was a rifle and what we needed was a sawed-off shotgun. As Alexa protested outside and my brain wilted in the heat and reek, I flushed the wretched toilet three more times before deciding it was okay to leave. By this point Lindsay had had enough of the place as well, and suggested a Lemony-Snicket-like title for it: “The Bad Bathroom.” I joined in with “The Lugubrious Lavatory” and later we got Alexa in on the game (“The Terrible Toilet” was one of her contributions).

(Don’t get the wrong idea here, by the way: I’m not complaining about Amtrak. The restrooms are about the only thing these trains have in common with the airlines. The people onboard the train are friendly and helpful, and everything is more comfortable.)

Train architecture – part two

One night we had a minor crisis involving the bunk beds. Erin decided to take the larger of the two upper berths instead of sharing the lower bunk with me. This meant the smaller of the upper berths was the only one available to the kids, and the other kid would have to settle for the smaller lower birth—the smallest and lowliest bed of all. Lindsay began to weep. Like Alexa, she naturally assumed that birth order would define things and she’d be stuck with the lousy bed. Alexa, to console her, began to sing the praises of the lower berth: more headroom, greater safety, etc. I mentioned the lightning storm I’d watched from the lower berth’s window in the middle of our first night. But as I couldn’t promise another lightning storm, this was little solace for Lindsay. I suggested that they share the top berth: no dice.

These are the conflicts that test a parent’s mettle, especially after he’s just spent twenty minutes digging through five compartments each of half a dozen carry-on bags, in the narrow hallway of a lurching train, for clean pajamas, and finding them twisted together with dirty laundry, sandals, and other personal effects, and is tired from the stress of catching two different trains earlier in the day and rescuing carry-on bags from a locker with a sketchy fingerprint reader, when his entire back and both feet are itching from mosquito bites, and the other sleeping car passengers have their doors open for ventilation and can hear every syllable of our family disputes.

I suppose I could have played the “strict parent” card and told Lindsay to take the lower berth “because I said so!” but I’m not into big battles, tears, etc. and gave the kids a bit longer to work it out on their own. Finally Alexa suggested that I pay one of them to take the bottom bunk. I pointed out that I shouldn’t have to pay, because my bed situation doesn’t change either way, but that I felt a financial arrangement might be just the thing. After a spell of haggling Alexa agreed to pay Lindsay $0.75 for the privilege of taking the top bunk. See? Kids can work it out. And in the process they learned a valuable lesson: money talks.

Scenery – part two

I spent a fine afternoon watching New Mexico roll by. (Never mind that it’s actually holding still while the train rolls by; you still use the terms “sunrise” and “sunset,” don’t you?) Red rolling hills dotted with scrubby plants, like an extreme close-up of razor stubble. Higher hills and buttes, mesas, all those cool Spanish-named geological features, and mountains here and there (the Sangre de Christos I reckon), some covered in trees, some bare. The land is dry, but not dead.

When Erin and I did our big bike tour in ’94, we decided that New Mexico and upstate New York were the prettiest states in the U.S. Part of the joy of New Mexico is how pristine it is. One evening during our bike tour as we rode through one of the poorest counties in the state, two different cars pulled up right next to us and drifted toward the shoulder, forcing us to stop or be run off the road. Just as we’d decided these were the meanest people in the West, a guy came running out of a little adobe house near the road and yelled for us to stop. He was incredibly friendly and invited us to stay the night at his place. After some hesitation, we accepted. In addition to having a great dinner (homemade tamales!) and a nice sleep, we learned that the people in that area all spoke an ancient 16th-century Spanish and were hostile to outsiders as a way of preserving their land. Our new friends said that when developers, usually from Texas, arrived to scope the place out, they simply disappeared. Word got around, and outsiders have learned to stay away. Of course I have no way to validate this story, but the fact remains this is a gorgeous area that hasn’t given way to tourists or retirees.

Situation room – part two

If you were bothered by situation room part one above, you should just stop reading right now.

It’s tempting, after a few days on the train, to think I’m getting the hang of things. For example, I passed up the temptation to wait until the train stopped to take a shower; the porter had warned that at these stops the water gets disconnected, so you can end up fully lathered with no water to rinse with. (Showering in motion is a bit of a trick, too, as the train swings around and you don’t have much to grab onto. And I had a devil of a time getting the water back on after lathering, as the knob was hard to turn and my soapy hands couldn’t grip it hard enough.) I also learned to use the toilet before running my kids and myself through our dental regimen, because the hyperactive faucet turns the counter-top into a big pool that can dump water on you when the train jerks.

Of course, such confidence is the stuff of fools—there’s always an unforeseen cataclysm waiting in the wings. In my case it was using the toilet at a station stop. I’d finished up and had only to flush when suddenly the power went out. This is actually pretty common at the longer stops and I’m sure there’s a good reason for it. What I hadn’t anticipated was that the toilet wouldn’t flush without electricity! I tried to wait it out, but I just couldn’t take that tiny, hot, stuffy restroom anymore. And yet, I couldn’t imagine leaving the un-flushed toilet for the next guy—I’d done some serious damage in there. I decided to wait just outside the door, but first I headed down the short hallway to my room to grab my wallet—the original point of this trip downstairs. (In the midst of my toilet situation, my family was waiting for me up in the dining car.)

Alas, on my way back to the restroom, I was waylaid by the friendly couple in the next sleeping room. I couldn’t exactly beg off—what would I tell them? “Sorry, I can’t dally—I’m babysitting an un-flushed toilet down there.” So I had a very pleasant conversation throughout which I was totally distracted. The woman had never been outside of Indiana before this trip, and now they’d been out for forty days. Any minute now somebody could board the train and take a quick left into that tiny, stinking restroom vestibule. The man was impressed at my kids’ vocabularies. A mere ten feet away an act of unintentional vandalism was underway. The couple was retired and loving it. Any second I might be running down the hallway, everything in super-slo-mo, my voice drawn out into a long, low drone: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Suddenly, deus ex machina: the lights snapped back on, the A/C whirred back to life, and there was a pause in the conversation. I quickly said, “Well, I’d better join the family up in the dining car. Nice to meet you!” I dashed down to the toilet. Nobody beat me there. Whew!

Off the train

Now we’re in Flagstaff, Arizona (while our house is under constant police surveillance, even though it houses items of only sentimental value and no resale value, so don’t even bother burglarizing the place). We’re in a nice bed & breakfast. It’s nice to have a place to spread out all our clothes and such, so we can sort them by totally filthy versus only lightly worn, and figure out which snacks have botulism versus a mere reek. Flagstaff strikes us as a really cool town; the climate, people, and general feel remind me of Boulder . Check out this sign I saw in a sandwich shop:

It was a timely sentiment, because after having a picnic and some run-around time at a little park, we went on a family hike that became a bit of an ordeal. We were searching for the Lowell Observatory, where Pluto was discovered. The kids’ bedtime is too early for Lowell’s telescopes at this time of year, but at least we could have checked out their sweet interferometer during the day. We were told the observatory was reachable by this trail, but we might as well have tried to find Pluto. Tall ponderosa pines prevented us from seeing what lay ahead, so it was an act of faith to keep on hiking. At one point we split up and Alexa and I forged ahead; this was of course a very bad idea. “The Blair Witch Project” came to mind, and eventually we were looking for hikers to eat. Alexa asked if she could drink from the muddy puddles alongside the trail. Oddly, there was nary a soul up there. By the time Alexa and I gave up, made our way back down the trail, reunited with Erin and Lindsay, and made it back to the B&B, our hike had lasted well over three hours.

Today we get back on the train and continue our journey. Now it’s time for breakfast, luggage sorting, and such; maybe I’ll even have time to upload this post. There may or may not be another train trip installment, depending on how remarkable the rest of our journey proves to be. Thanks for tuning in!

dana albert blog

Train Trip - Part Two

NOTE: this post is rated PG-13 for an instance of mild strong language.

Introduction

If you feel you need an introduction, perhaps you haven’t read my previous post, “Train Trip – Part 1.” Or perhaps you don’t need this introduction at all, and yet here it is, like that weird snub-nosed hair dryer provided in a hotel room, or those gross individually-wrapped toothpaste-flavored candies in the glass bowl at an otherwise great restaurant. (This introduction exists for the sake of form; I try for a certain consistency with these posts, having not yet read enough Donald Barthelme to develop better habits.) Suffice to say I’m in a huge rush, writing a bit here in the observation lounge before the rest of the family wakes up. Thus, there may not be any structure to this post, and it may run a bit long. The Times regrets—no, wait, the Times breathes a huge sigh of relief—that it isn’t paying me by the word, nor, in fact, at all.

Train architecture

I’m in the observation lounge, looking out the huge window at, uh, Kansas I think. It’s easy to get disoriented when you wake up on a train that’s been cruising along at 70 mph all night. To my left is the bar. So far on this trip there has been no activity at the bar: no drinks served, no bartender, no booze inventory. Just a little sink and the kind of faucet where you push the glass against a half-ring, and two small fridges built into the cabinetry. I picture a time, back when Americans drank cocktails, when this bar would have been the nerve center of the entire observation car: guys with narrow neckties and short haircuts drinking highballs. You can still get beer on the train, but it’s downstairs in the cheerless little snack bar among the Doritos and refrigerated box sandwiches. (Of course, this car is gorgeous, and has no need for a two-drink minimum.)

I’ve often filled our water bottles here at this abandoned bar, reaching over its low partition, feeling vaguely subversive. If anybody gives me a hard time about this it’ll be the Scoutmaster to my right, who is presiding over six or eight Boy Scouts on this train. The other day this Scoutmaster scowled at me hard for no apparent reason, though I’ve decided the scowl might just be his natural expression. He doesn’t look happy at all, though perhaps I wouldn’t be either if I had to wear a full Boy Scout uniform in public throughout my vacation.

Anyhow, yesterday evening I saw somebody manning the bar for the first time, but it was a college-age girl, standing behind the partition working on her laptop PC. I couldn’t figure out why she chose that area, having to stand and risking the wrath of the Scoutmaster, when there were seats available. (She wasn’t serving drinks, needless to say.) This morning the mystery is solved: she was there for the electrical outlet. This train, though it looks a lot like the one we took east toward Chicago, is evidently a bit older and doesn’t have electrical jacks running along the walls. The other one had plenty of them (each labeled “120 Volts” since probably half the passengers on these trains are foreigners). The only electrical outlet in the whole car is that one at the bar. I’ve got my laptop cord snaked through there and hope to have my battery back to 100% before the Scoutmaster notices.

Situation room

Downstairs from the observation lounge is the snack bar and a restroom that mainly serves the coach passengers. This restroom is certainly harder-used than the ones in the sleeper cars. We only use it when the kids need a restroom during our meal, as it’s quicker to get here via the observation lounge than to go back through the sleeper cars. During one meal I stood outside the restroom, chaperoning Alexa, when another passenger (ball cap, sleeveless t-shirt, slack jaw, paunch) went right by me toward it. It didn’t occur to him that I was in line. I guess he thought I just preferred standing over sitting, and preferred restroom-perfumed air to fresh. I said, “Hey, dumbass, you think I’m just standing here for my health?”

No, of course I didn’t really say that. I said, “There’s someone in there.” He replied, “Both of ‘em?” and continued down the short dead-end hallway. There is of course only one restroom there. I replied, “Oh, I didn’t know there was a second one.” When the guy discovered there was only one restroom, he said, “Oh, my goodness, right you are! I’ll line up behind you like any reasonable person.” No, of course he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything: he just tried the latch on the one restroom, where Alexa was. I guess he figured I was lying about the restroom being occupied, or was somehow mistaken, or perhaps he thought that tiny door would miraculously open out into a giant multi-stall men’s room. Alexa called out, “Excuse me, I’m in here.” The guy came back out past me, mouth-breathing, his brain unable (through overexertion or sheer paralysis) to contrive a facial expression. This is the beauty of a train: aren’t you glad this idiot isn’t on the highway instead, buzzing along at 80 in his Ford Expedition, changing lanes without checking his blind spot?

Off the train

Last Thursday we got off the train in Chicago. It had been a great three days but the kids were starting to become unstable, in the way that a nuclear reactor sometimes does. Their roughhousing was becoming more violent and unstructured, approaching that of two little boys (which of course I have no stomach for). My attempts to calm my daughters down were failing. I put a stack of pillows between them; these became weapons. I felt my authority slipping away: the kids would desist for only moments before gradually going at each other again. If Joan Didion had been trapped in our little sleeping car, she’d have said, “The center cannot hold, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

The train was only about four hours late, which wasn’t bad at all over such a long distance, with a freight train derailment along the line. (Amtrak pays the freight companies to use their tracks.) Our checked bag, however, took another forty-five minutes to reach us. It’s hard to know, in a train station you’ve never set foot in, that you’re in the right place, that there isn’t an evil twin baggage claim area that actually has your stuff. There were no announcements of any kind concerning any of this, and when I asked somebody in an Amtrak uniform what was up, he said, “Oh, it’s on the way. They had to wake up baggage.”

We spent the night in Chicago (our hotel, which we’d paid for in advance, was overbooked and they sent us down to a “sister property” and refunded our money!) and we spent the next morning recombobulating ourselves. Then we had lunch at an Italian place called Volare. Glorious! Look at this pappardelle alla Bolognese I had:

As I cropped the photo just now, this big black woman passing behind me must have looked over my shoulder because she said, “Mm-mmm-mmh.” And she’s right.

It was hot and sunny and humid in Chicago. We found a little pocket park with a fountain. The kids were instructed not to get wet. They got drenched. Erin said, “I can’t believe they got wet!” I replied, “I can’t believe you can’t believe they got wet!”

There’s a big park in Chicago next to the naval pier, and a nice stretch of beach. The kids wrestled on the grass for at least an hour. Instead of running all over Chicago (in the heat and humidity) and trying to tick off items on a metaphorical tourist’s checklist, we just spent the afternoon at this park relaxing.

Unreasonably close to the departure of our next train—which would take us a short distance up to Michigan to visit some friends—we suddenly became ambitious and headed to the John Hancock building. It’s not as tall as the Tower Formerly Known As Sears but has the best view in the city, according to our waiter at Volare. To be precise, he recommended the view from the women’s bathroom in the 96th floor lounge. The elevator made all our ears pop. Here’s the view Erin and the girls got to see:

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There is no window at all in the men’s room of the 96th floor lounge.

It was a bit tight making our train to Michigan. I have a vivid memory of my kids sprinting down the platform ahead of Erin and me, the train seething and groaning next to us.

Michigan was excellent. Among other attractions, there is a gorgeous beach near New Buffalo:

After a lovely few days with our friends we headed back to Chicago, where we locked up our luggage in the baggage claim room at the station. This took twenty-five minutes because it involved a fingerprint reader that wasn’t working. The attendant got it basically working and I managed to cram our carry-on bags in the locker. On the way to checking our last bag I realized I’d locked up our tickets with the carry-ons. I went back, released our baggage, checked out the locker again—only it assigned me a different one so I had to move everything—and then when we checked that last bag we finally learned the location of the mythic passenger lounge where they’ll hold your bags for free. (I’ll be making a voodoo doll of the person at the information desk who played dumb about this lounge and directed us to the lockers.) By now we’d wasted not only $12 but too much time to go up in the Tower Formerly Known As Sears. Here’s an exterior shot, anyway:

We still had time to head over to Giordano’s for real Chicago-style pizza. (Doubtless a local would contest the “real” label, since Giordano’s is a chain, but so is Uno, and we have no guide, so what could we do?) Regardless, it was tasty:

(Note, in that photo, how assiduously Lindsay is wiping salad dressing off her plate so as not to taint her pristine pizza.) In case you’re wondering how this ‘za compares to other offerings, it’s quite similar to Zachary’s in Berkeley, whereas Uno (the original one) is more similar to Little Star in San Francisco. Uno and Little Star are single-crust pies with a cornmeal crust. Giordano’s and Zach’s are double-crust pizzas. Overall, I found Giordano slightly inferior to Zach’s: the sauce isn’t as bright or zesty. (Uno outside of Chicago, meanwhile, is greasy in a Pizza Hut way, though I still like it a lot.)

We have many dozens of itchy souvenirs from Michigan: during movie night, outdoors near the swimming pool, we were absolutely feasted upon by mosquitoes, despite taking every precaution. We’d worn socks, shoes, long pants, long-sleeved shorts, bug spray that smelled like Thai food, and even these Lawrence of Arabia hats, provided by our hosts, that covered our necks—but all to no avail. I slaughtered a good many mosquitoes, but clearly not enough. My entire back is a night sky of welts—you could make out any number of constellations. At least the bites are small (perhaps due to the allergy shots I get?) compared to that of our host, whose back was a raised topographical map of mountainous welts. Erin got it really bad, too, on her legs: evidently those insect bastards could bite right through her pants. Alexa has one on her face and another on her neck, poor kid. Next time it’s jeans and a denim jacket, kitchen gloves, and rubber waders.

Scenery

During dinner the other night, we crossed over the Mississippi River. It was all but unmistakable given its vast size, but since the waitress was right there we asked her if it was indeed the Mississippi. She glanced out the window as if she’d never seen the river before, and said she really didn’t know. As she turned to head to the kitchen area, I said to Erin and the kids, “I did hear one guy say that this was the largest body of water west or east of the Mississippi.” The waitress turned back and said, “Is that right?” (This is what we in the amateur comedy industry refer to as “collateral damage.”)

Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa offer multiple—no, countless—no, almost continuous—opportunities to look at cornfields flying by.

If a Martian landed on this train and looked out the window for a few days, he would probably conclude that corn is the main thing we humans eat. And yet all these cornfields aren’t abounding with the sweet corn that humans can eat; it’s all for cattle. So the question is, where is all this cattle? In feed lots, of course, and though rolling by a feed lot or two would be educational for the kids, I’m just as glad they’re not on display here.

We also pass by fields of soy, though I somehow missed my opportunity to photograph them. At least the kids got to see them. In their bedroom at home is a U.S. map showing (via cartoonish drawings) the main industries and exports of each state. Northern California has a picture of a semiconductor, which my kids easily recognized. Around Iowa in the map is a little bag labeled “soy.” Soybeans are among our country’s largest exports but nobody knows what the plants look like. For the record, they’re darker green and lower than cornstalks, and leafier. Not as characteristic as the cornstalks—or is it just that they’re not as ubiquitous here?

This isn’t to say the scenery is boring. The rows of manicured crops create nice optical effects if you blur then focus your eyes. The abundance is kind of soothing. Meanwhile, I get to watch freight trains, which pass by regularly. The sheer range of vintages and styles of these trains never ceases to fascinate me. Watching them at stations is the best way: when they come by, you can feel the vibration in your feet and the wind coming off of them. They are serious industrial beasts. Best of all, when I'm traveling by train I don’t have to look at automobiles. In general, I hate cars. If you asked me to rate each car we saw as we drove along an American highway, I’d say, “Ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, passable, ugly, ugly, hideous, ugly, ugly, okay, ugly, ugly, passable.” And there are too many lousy drivers on the road to give me complete peace on road trips. The train is really the better way to go.

Check back soon for Train Trip Part 3 – Dining Car Ewok Meatloaf Special!

dana albert blog

Train Trip - Part One

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and a scene of mild sensuality.

Introduction

I’m on vacation with my family, taking a cross-country train trip to Chicago. In case you’re a criminal who trolls people’s blogs to see who’s out of town, and plan to burglarize my house while I’m away, think again. I could be home in two days, or could be home already. As my brother wrote in his grade-school “My Book About Me,” I am not stuppid.

In this post I’ll give a bit of personal history regarding my past trips on Amtrak; explain how we chose this unique vacation; offer a few pre-trip tales; and provide a day and a half of impressions and such. I’ll also include a recipe for my mother’s famous cranberry bread and step-by-step instructions on changing the oil in a 1986 Ford Fiero, per usual.

My previous train trips

I first rode Amtrak during the early nineties when I took it most of the way to Ashland, Oregon to visit my mom. The closest station was Dunsmuir, I think (I can’t fact-check because I have no Internet connection, a problem I’ll have to solve before posting this, obviously). It could have been a six-hour car trip. Instead, the train limped along at about thirty, which is all the track conditions would allow it to do. Somehow we got so delayed that some passengers were going to miss a connection, so the train was stopped in the middle of nowhere for a couple of hours so a bus (!) could come fetch those passengers and speed them ahead to rendezvous with their connecting train. (By this time Amtrak had sunk, in my regard, from legitimate transportation to pointless novelty.) I had to get out at some station—where I absolutely froze, it being winter—to find a pay phone, to tell my mom to wait a couple hours before driving down to meet me. The trip took ten or twelve hours.

My next Amtrak trip was coming home, a few days later. This was worse. The delays so infuriated me that my brain stopped shunting things into long-term memory and I don’t recall anything about that trip except that a) I couldn’t sleep because everybody on the train was a loud snorer, and b) it took twenty-five hours to get home. I vowed never to ride Amtrak again.

So, why this trip?

Obviously I’ve broken that vow, and it’s all because of “Parade” magazine, that little ten-page insert that comes in your Sunday paper. I don’t get the paper, but my mother-in-law, at my request, saves the Parades for me. It’s a guilty pleasure. I like the silly cartoons, the brain teasers from Marilyn Vos Savant (which I lack the patience to actually try solving), the ads for the Amish guys who are giving away portable fireplaces or air cooling systems that cost pennies to run because they’re not air conditioners. I even read the incessantly upbeat profiles of famous actors, with headlines like “What I’ve Learned” or “Love Is the Most Important Thing,” etc. (I really wish one day they’d profile Eminem. His feature would be titled, “God sent me to piss the world off.”)

Anyway, Amtrak had an article about cross-country train trips and how cool they are. I’d heard over the years that the interstate trains with sleeper cars are actually pretty cool and that the shorter-route bus-style trains were the Achilles heel of the system. Thus, I read the feature with an open mind. (Heck, I always read “Parade” with my mind wide open and all skepticism withheld. You kind of have to.) I learned that that billions of dollars have been pumped into Amtrak recently, not only by the Obama administration but by Warren Buffett (who would never invest in a doomed enterprise, would he?).

There’s a lot about train travel that, right off the bat, is enticing. Logistically, it’s pretty simple once you’ve assembled all your stuff and your family has made it on-board. Meals and lodging are included, making the trip fairly easy to budget (though it’s not cheap). Going by train is probably the best vacation possible for keeping a small carbon footprint while still getting to see faraway places. Moreover, the U.S. is, in my opinion, highly underrated as a place to travel across (an opinion which was only strengthened by a nine-month 7,500-mile coast-to-coast bike tour that my wife Erin and I took in 1994).

And finally, I think our kids are the perfect age for this. They can enjoy a, b, and c without pining for x,y, and z. For example, teenagers, the way things are going, might not be able to go a whole day, much less multiple days, without Internet connectivity. Meanwhile, even pre-teens might be too jaded to fully appreciate something so subtle as the niftiness of how a train car manages to fit everything, Tetris-like, into a minimal space. (When my family goes to the Claire Tappan lodge the kids wring remarkable amounts of pleasure from the bunk beds.) And I figured my young children’s culinary tastes would still be vulgar enough to enjoy what I expected would be fairly mediocre food. (Alexa said the other day, “Remember that hotel in Sacramento, the Embassy Suites? That omelette was amazing. It was thick and fluffy and inside there were just gobs of really gooey cheese. I remember it to this day!”)

The lead-up

We prepared carefully for this trip. You can’t do your laundry on a train, and can’t stop at a convenience store, and we feared that failing to bring enough activities for the kids could turn our train ride into a prison riot. So we bought some portable games, laid in a supply of decent books, and I picked up a couple of Lemony Snicket audio books. (These I had to rip to MP3, retag the files so they’d play sequentially, find the little speaker thingy I got at a fund-raiser years ago and never used, dredge up its AC adapter, find a reliable MP3 player, locate a male-to-male headphone cord to connect the two, and find the USB cable to charge the MP3 player.) And of course we had to pack. Here’s our checklist shortly before our departure:

Meanwhile, my credit card number was stolen recently so up to the last day before vacation I was updating all these autopay setups (last time this happened I neglected to update GoDaddy, who locked up my albertnet domain, killing my blog, my e-mail, and my family’s e-mail accounts). The day before the trip we had a plumbing issue and Erin was running all over town buying fixtures and dealing with the plumber. And I can’t begin to describe how hard it is to find a crazy gun-nut house-sitter willing to sit in our living room all day and night with a shotgun across his lap during our absence, waiting to gun down a would-be burglar. Finding a gun-nut like that who is also good with cats is especially difficult.

Preparations aside, the anticipation of the trip kept the kids in good spirits for weeks beforehand. Alexa brought me this note a few days ago when I was on the phone:

And the morning of the trip, the kids were simply jubilant:

The station

I recognized the Amtrak station in Emeryville right away: I had loitered there for hours once, five years ago, waiting for my train-delayed brother and his family to arrive. We loitered some more this time, having shown up incredibly early. Right away I appreciated the lack of security. There’s no line, no x-ray, no notices … it’s like boarding a bus, other than checking baggage (for free, as much as you want, meaning those venal airlines can officially go stuff it). We checked one bag, which had our contact lens fluid in it—d’oh! Once we got all our carry-ons loaded on the train and found our sleeping car, we still had like twenty minutes before the train left. I decided this would be a rare opportunity to get a photo of the front of the train. The kids protested bitterly, as they were certain I’d somehow fail to make it back on the train and would miss our vacation. Here’s the shot:

When I passed by the window of our sleeper car Alexa was pounding on the window, gesticulating for me to hurry up. I stopped to get her picture, and came up against the old reflection problem (which has made photography from the train difficult as well). It made for an interesting shot, anyway, after Lindsay joined her sister:

I got back on the train, returned to our room, and sat down. Soon the train just started rolling, with no fanfare. No safety announcements, no instructions on how to operate a seatbelt, no fussing with an overhead bin, no shrieking of a jet engine outside my window. Just gobs of legroom.

Our first crisis

Naturally, being first-time interstate train travelers, we made a crucial mistake, with disastrous consequences you might have actually heard about on the news. Okay, I’m grossly exaggerating for fear of losing your interest. But we did mess up, by following the instructions of our porter: “Don’t go to the dining car until the conductor makes an announcement! He’ll do that at either 11:00 or 11:30.” At about 11:35 we got impatient and went up there. Every table was already taken. We put our name in, and for the next two hours I made one bad promise after another to my kids about when we’d be seated.

This might not have been a big deal, except that none of us had had a proper meal in a couple of days. We were too busy preparing for the trip and using up the random food in the fridge. Twice we gave Lindsay broccoli of questionable vintage, and she actually ate it. I dreamt about nothing but food the night before we left (which normally only happens when I’ve dug myself into a caloric hole with a long bike ride). Nobody got much breakfast.

Anyway, when we finally got a table in the dining car, the service was unhurried—in fact, the waiter read the entire menu out loud to Lindsay. It may be that the kitchen is the weak link in the system, and the limited number of tables and long meals keep the cooks from falling behind. Anyway, the food ended up being pretty darn good. My standard point of reference is the burger. Here it is:

I’m bound to put on some pounds on this trip because lunch and dinner both come with dessert. So far I’ve sampled (through my own selections and mandatory parental tariffs of my kids’) the cheesecake (excellent), carrot cake (also excellent), ice cream (Haagen Dazs, ‘nuff said), gooey brownie (delicious), and lemon sorbet (Ciao Bella or whatever, great). Meanwhile Erin is still on the South Beach Diet, so I’m getting enough second-hand food to break new ground with my North Beach Diet. Here’s the little family at the tail end of dinner:

Scenery

The view really is better from a train. We’ve often taken Interstate 80 past places like Sacramento and Auburn, but I can appreciate them more seeing the older, better parts. We had a guide from the California Railway Museum (tk) onboard until Reno, and she pointed some things out. For example, Rockland is named after all its quarries, and Roseville used to be called Junction, because it was a major railway hub. Its citizens, feeling expansive after a city-wide picnic, renamed it Roseville after the most popular girl in town. After Reno, I had to take over with the education of the kids. I just made stuff up, of course; they’re never going to know. (For example, when we passed through Helper, Utah, I pointed out that it has a sister city in Florida called Enabler; Erin chimed in about the third sister city, Co-Dependant, Missouri.)

Past the dining car is the observation lounge, a spectacular place. Look:

Though it’s hard to snap photos out the window, I got a few. The first was taken near Auburn, Californa; the rest are from western Colorado. (We slept through Nevada and as we went through Utah we were down in the sleeping car, which has kind of small windows.)

Living in California, I miss the gorgeous clouds of Colorado, and not since my childhood have I had the idle pleasure of watching telephone wires swoop like this:

I was lying on my back reading in the sleeping car when Erin suddenly burst out laughing. I was too late to see what had so amused her. She explained that a pair of young sunbathers on the banks of the Truckee River had greeted the train with irrational exuberance: the young man held his arms out at ninety-degrees to flex his biceps, and the young woman next to him pulled up her shirt and flashed the train! I’d heard before of this kind of thing with Amtrak. Needless to say I’m cursing my fate at having missed it.

Night

Watching the porter convert our seats into beds was really something. Lindsay had been asking all day if she could have an upper berth, but I couldn’t promise anything. In the morning the porter had said, “This one that folds down into a double … it may be big enough for you and your wife. Some couples can do it, some can’t. I’m gonna leave that up to you.” In the event I found the bed not only wide enough for two, but remarkably comfortable. Lindsay was ecstatic about getting an upper berth. “This is too good to be true!” she sqealed.

Being on the train after dark, I couldn’t help but think of the James Bond movie, “Live and Let Die” I think it was, where towards the end Bond is getting ready to bed down his Bond girl and one last villain shows up. The girl is in another room—it must be a suite, or Bond is in the bathroom or something—and she is oblivious to the hand-to-hand combat. I kind of wished I could take out some nemesis too, as long as he didn’t put up too much of a fight.

I slept pretty well, though there must have been some bumps because twice I dreamed of crashing my mountain bike in snow (and thus not being hurt). There was an annoyingly persistent clicking as I dropped off to sleep, but I wear earplugs and didn’t mind. The only trouble was the closet door that kept bumping my elbow; I couldn’t figure out how it kept coming unlatched. At maybe 4 a.m. Erin told me to quit shutting it: she had been re-opening it all night because its latch was causing the annoyingly persistent clicking. Eureka!

So far the train is about two hours behind schedule. A freight train derailment ahead of us will screw over some of the passengers, but (if I heard the announcement right) shouldn’t affect us.

Stay tuned for Train Trip Part 2 – Ewoks On the Tracks!