Day 2 (Sun., 28-June-2009): Chicago to the Dakotas on the Empire Builder
Jul/090
In our last installment, recall that we went to bed on board the Lake Shore Limited expecting to arrive in Chicago at around 9:45 AM. And we did.
As sleeping car ticket holders for the Empire Builder, we were allowed to use the Metropolitan Lounge at the Chicago Amtrak Station. This is no big honor, because there are many overnight trains that depart from Chicago. Still, it was nice to have a resting spot where we could check our bags. Our train wasn’t to leave until 2:15 PM, which gave us plenty of time to roam around the Loop. We checked out the Sears Tower, which was closed due to wind (or so they said . . .)
We walked over to Millennium Park and looked at the fountains and at Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate.” Why doesn’t Boston have any world-class outdoor art spot right downtown?
As luck would have it, on arrival we discovered that it was the first day of Taste of Chicago in Grant Park. This isn’t like a “Taste of Cambridge,” which is an outdoor (and expensive) event catered by the finer restaurants in town; this is an outdoor munch fest hosted by the fried and fat segment of Chicago’s fooderies. Caroline and Julie split a nice waffle, and I ate potato- and saurkraut-filled pirogies, which were delightful. Oh, and then some ice cream. After all that, we were tired and went back to the station.
Sleeper car ticket holders were called to the front of the lounge to meet with the conductor. Julie was told that we didn’t have a train! Uh oh. There was much concern among the passengers-to-be, but in the end we left right on time.
We got on our train and proceeded to a “family room.” This is a sleeper with four beds, one of them wide enough for two skinny parents to cohabitate. We picked it for the extra room, though a downside was that it didn’t have its own bathroom — the shower was done the hall. In general, the sleeper seemed newer, cleaner, and not dingy. One thing, however: The cars on the Empire Builder are “Superliners,” and have two levels on each car. Because of this, the headroom is somewhat limited. It’s not much of an issue for standing in the sleeper, but if you’re sleeping in the top bunk, it’s a bit like being in a coffin. Claustrophobes beware.
Once on the train we proceeded through Wisconsin. There was a “Rails and Trails” guide on board in the lounge car (observation car) to provide geographical and anthropological points of interest regarding the people from America’s Dairyland.
But for the most part, it a flat and green Midwest to behold, with which I am much familiar. I thought I had gotten some pics of the Wisconsin Dells, but apparently not; maybe they’re on Julie’s camera.
After settling down in our sleeper, we made reservations for the dining car. We were only 3, and one may be seated with strangers to fill out the full table of 4. I ordered catfish; Julie ordered lamb shank; and Caroline had penne with meatballs. It was pretty good!
There was also a half-bottle of some mediocre wine; more about train wine in the post for Day 3.
After dinner there was more window-gazing at dairy country, which lulled us into a sleepy state, and back to the sleeping car.
I woke up at around 10:30 PM because I wanted to observe the entry into St. Paul, where I had gone to high school. At this time of night, the lounge car was pretty deserted. I was still a bit buzzed from dinner so I grabbed a root beer and went up to watch. I got out my iPhone and observed the approach with Google Maps and the built-in GPS. To my surprise, the tracks into St. Paul go right below Linwood Park:
View Larger Map
When I played Little League at Linwood and was waiting to bat, I would surreptitiously walk over to the fence on the edge of the park, and look down at the tracks (perhaps some 50 feet below and 100 yards distant). Frequently a freight train would go by, and I would count the cars and think about hopping a train so as to “light out for the Territory,” if you know what I mean.
Now I was on those very tracks, looking up into the dark as Linwood passed by.
After that, the approach to Midway Station was uneventful; I did see the Cathedral of St. Paul, but not much else of great notice. Weary, I went back to the sleeper, to dream of lighting out for the Territory . . .
Day 1 (Sat., 27-June-2009): Lakeshore Limited, Boston to Chicago
Jun/092
Day 1
The first day on the train was all about getting used to the idea of hours on the train, exploring the sleeper, reading, eating, and hanging out. We departed on time.
The sleeper was small and a bit dingy. The windows could have been a lot cleaner. I lowered the upper bunk to check it out, and there was a mattress in there for the bottom bunk, as well as a ladder. I closed that up. Later on we opened it up and I set up the ladder and put the mattress for the bottom bunk into a luggage storage section that was over the door. One thing I would say about these sleepers is that if you’re elderly and a bit shaky, you probably don’t want to use the upper bunk, or you would only want to navigate the ladder when the train is stopped. The bathroom was a combination toilet/shower, which I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post.
Western Massachusetts was beautiful as always but somewhat monotonous. We followed the Westfield River.
Didn’t see any wildlife. Getting a bit bored with the window, we all read: I read: One Second After; Julie read: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; and Caroline read Ruby the Red Fairy, a real page-flipper by the looks of it.
The dining car hadn’t been attached for lunch, so, as sleeper-car passengers, we got a free lunch from the Cafe car: pesto-chicken sandwiches for Julie and me (flavorless), but accompanied with a pretty good salad with chickpeas, cucumbers, etc.; for Caroline an over-microwaved hotdog. The dessert was pre-fab as well, but tasty: a chocolate mousse.
The stop in Albany was two hours; at this stop, cars were added from a New York train, including a dining car. At the Albany Station (which is actually in Rensselaer) we asked if there was a playground nearby; and, sure enough, there was one just a brief walk away, right on the river separating Rensselaer and Albany. This was underneath the Interstate leading out of Albany, and seemed to be one of those guilty-ish parks built after urban renewal. The families at the park seemed pretty poor, but they loved their park: There were kids playing tennis, throwing the baseball, playing on the jungle gym, etc. I walked down to the Hudson River, and people were fishing. Caroline got some sillies out.
Then we returned to the train, boarded, and shortly afterwards had supper in the Dining Car, which was surprisingly good. Julie and I both had the train’s version of beef burgundy, and Caroline had penne with sauce. And we drank two half-bottles of “wine” which was ok.
Caroline really was too shy to socialize with anyone. There were two families with kids of somewhat similar disposition to ours, and we talked with them a bit, but there was little resonance. (Though one dad laughed at my lame joke when he said we were in the boonies and I quibbled that we were actually in the sticks.)
Then back to the sleeper. While we were in the dining car our sleeping car attendant set up the beds for sleep. Caroline konked out fast;
Julie and I kept reading; and before long we were all asleep. I think I woke up some ten times during the night, always due to the strange noises and slowdowns and speedups of the train. Also, the train was blowing its horn at seemingly every crossing, which surprised me. Still, I did get sleep.
Cambridge to South Station
Jun/091
Free bandwidth at the Acela Lounge . . . so I can upload some pics.
The train to Chicago is completely sold out.
Our entire trip is courtesy of Julie’s frequent rider miles on Amtrak — she commutes to/from the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH, two or three times per week. Had we purchased these tickets (including sleepers and meals the whole way), it would have cost about $4,700.
Julie with tickets
Julie told Caroline not to wear her flip-flops for the walk to the Kendall T; but she insisted. And, sure enough, they started to hurt, so she needed to switch to her sneakers.
Caroline changing shoes
Caroline reading the comics at South Station
Train to Oregon via Glacier National Park: Itinerary
Jun/090
Here’s our itinerary for those who’d like to follow along:
Saturday June 27:
Leave Boston 11:55 a.m.
Sunday June 28:
Arrive Chicago 9:45 a.m.
Leave Chicago 2:15 p.m.
Monday June 29:
Arrive East Glacier Park 6:45 p.m.
Pick up rental car 7:30 p.m.
Night at Glacier Park Lodge
Tuesday June 30:
Drive around Glacier Park
Night at St. Mary’s Lodge (in a Teepee!!)
Wednesday July 1:
Drive around Waterton Park
Leave East Glacier Park 6:45 p.m.
Thursday July 2:
Arrive Portland 10:10 a.m.
Night at Nine’s Hotel
Friday July 3:
Leave Portland 4:45 p.m.
Sunday July 5:
Arrive Chicago 3:55 p.m.
Leave Chicago 9:00 p.m.
Monday July 6:
Arrive Boston 9:10 p.m.
Trip on the Empire Builder: What I’m Taking
Jun/090
So I’ve just finished the majority of my packing for the big train trip, and here’s what I’m taking:
- Change of clothes for 4 days (we should be able to wash our clothes in Glacier National Park).
- Nice pair of pants and a shirt so we can go out to something more than casual if need be.
- A sweater. I’m not taking a jacket, which I may end up regretting. No umbrella, either.
- Laptop (MacBook Air), and very light external DVD drive.
- Earphones. Rechargers. Cords.
- iPhone (set up for tethering).
- Digital camera. Adapter to get photos off of the camera.
- Kindle.
- Passports.
- Sunglasses.
- Toys and entertainment for Caroline: E.g., portable “Battleship” game, deck of cards, MadLibs, etc.
Am I forgetting anything?
Books for the train trip
Jun/090
So as I’ve said, I’m going to be taking a long train ride with my family coast-to-coast: To Chicago, then Chicago to Portland, Oregon on the Empire Builder via Glacier National Park . . . and then back.
So there will be a lot of time for reading.
Here’s what I have on my Kindle in sample form, in the order in which I will probably read them:
Reynolds Price, Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back. Price is one of the most distinguished old-school “men of letters,” and this is his book about his time at Oxford, coming of age. Not sure if it gets up to his shift to the wheel chair.
Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor: A Novel. About an upper-middle-class African-American teen, somewhat younger (in the time period of the novel) than I was, dealing with the social contradictions of his milieu.
William R. Forstchen, One Second After. This is a novel about how a small town deals with life after North America’s technology is wrecked by an electromagnetic pulse. Forstchen has co-written some novels with Newt Gingrich. I won’t hold that against him. I’m not a big fan of the politics, but I’m a sucker for a good end-of-the-world novel (my recent favorite being World Made by Hand).
Clancy Martin, How to Sell: A Novel. About . . . well, I don’t know what it’s really about, but the setting seems to be the diamond district in NYC.
Joseph Findler, Paranoia. Everyone deserves a good corporate thriller.
Christopher Buckley, Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir. I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Buckley, especially, of course, Thank You for Smoking. The extract of this memoir in the New Yorker was a great read, and it would seem that it’s also great at this length.
I’m also thinking about this new chick-lit book called Commencement about a group of Smith College grads. And there are books people have recommended to me such as the Kite Runner, Wikinomics, In Defense of Food. We’ll see.
And why these books? Dunno. A lot are memoir or memoir-esque; some are about places; they all seem to be page-turners, and none are horribly serious.
More suggestions welcome!
Train trip to Portland, Oregon, and back on the Empire Builder
Jun/090
A week from today I’m taking a train trip with my family from Boston, Massachusetts to Portland, Oregon; the leg of the trip from Chicago to Portland will be on Amtrak’s Empire Builder train.
For Father’s Day (well, a couple of days early) my wife and daughter gave me a couple of books to read about the Great Northern railway. The first one is All Aboard for Glacier, by C. W. Guthrie (Amazon). I can recommend it without reservation; it is packed with great pictures and anecdotes, and tells the story of James J. Hill, the entrepreneur who greated the Great Northern, the building of the tracks, the founding of Glacier National Park, and the evolution of passenger rail service.
I’ve just started the other book, which is Claire Strom’s Profiting From the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West (Amazon). It looks more academic, but promises to be interesting as well.
In the following weeks I’ll be making more posts regarding our preparation for the trip and the trip itself.
All aboard!
Nice post at Geezeo regarding BeatThat!
Mar/090
Geezeo — the community-driven personal finance site — did a nice blog post on our product BeatThat!
About the Kindle
Mar/090
So I bought the Kindle. My motivation was to stop buying books; I’m sick of accumulating the mass and killing the trees. It’s both less and more than I thought it would be.
On the “less” side, it is amazing what it can’t do. It can’t flip rapidly between pages. It isn’t super-easy to make notes or search (though you can do all of these things). . . . It is optimized for reading, that is, reading paragraphs of prose text, moving from page to page. Because of the small size of the screen, it wouldn’t be very good for reading computer manuals which frequently have important images or bits of code that shouldn’t wrap to the display. The fact that it is optimized for this particular kind of reading also means that it is really not a general tool for, say, students who want to conduct research. Apparently Amazon designed to do this one thing very very well (read prose, page by page); if you’re a student, you probably want your whole computer anyway, as you might have a PDF open in one window, a caculator or Excel or MATLAB open in another.
On the “more” side, the free network connectivity is going to be interesting. I’ll be taking a coast-to-coast train trip this summer, and I was wondering what I would do to rent an AirCard for the 10 days we’ll be traveling. Well, you can read your GMail just fine on the Kindle. And there are no charges for this connectivity — it’s included in the purchase price.
Another surprise is that there are quite a few Kindle books (4,000+) from Amazon that are free; most in the public domain. So I downloaded the Bible, Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” and a few other goodies. Unfortunately, not all of these free editions have tables of contents, so my download of Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age isn’t so useful if you want to jump right to “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Still, that’s pretty neat.
Juliana Hatfield, When I Grow Up (Book Review)
Jan/090
Juliana Hatfield, When I Grow Up: A Memoir (2008). $24.95. [Amazon
I’m a sucker for a good rock and roll memoir, and picked up Juliana Hatfield’s when I first saw that it was available. Hatfield was the lead singer and bass player of the Blake Babies, and went on to a decent solo career (for the history and discographies, see Wikipedia and allmusic). She has a wonderful sense for melody, and the good sense to pick great producers who can beef up her guitars and voice to balance out her sound. She spent time at Berklee and knows her musical onions.
The book is a mixture of nearly present-day tour diary and reflection on past days, alternating chapters (more on less) on these two topics. The tour is a multi-city trip of her most recent band-effort, Some Girls. In both parts, everything that is concrete and detailed is funny or thought-provoking or memorable. You hear about the creeps who want more than her autograph, the jerks who have interviewed her unfairly, the bad hotels and good hotels (I want to go to the Congress Hotel in Tucson based on her brief assessment here), the friends and lovers (?) she sees only on the road. Good stuff. There is a great story of the first meeting of the Blake Babies. She is trenchant on the difficulties managing personalities on a tour. And she’s honest about the money.
Picture: Christian Kock
There is also a lot about her personal weaknesses and artistic efforts: This was tougher for me. She is hopelessly shy and self-doubting, but at the same time driven at the core to make music. But there was maybe too much of this. When she does go into detail on her emotional ups-and-downs — for instance, on her trouble with food — she gets interesting again. But, really, I’m on already on her side emotionally because her music is great.
One thing for sure: If you’re in a band and thinking about a tour, or about making a career of music . . . This is one to read, because it’s a tough road.
