Wrap up

About one week before we embarked on our trip, I made a list of things I was and was not looking forward to.  Let's revisit:

What I was looking forward to:

• The scenery - we saw a lot of really incredible scenery as we traveled about.  The best were the mountains - the Cascades in Washington and Oregon were spectacular.  Even the more boring areas like the fields across North Dakota or the deserts of Texas had their own beauty (but maybe a little less of them would have been nice!).  One regret is that the Empire Builder was running far enough behind schedule that we completely missed Glacier National Park.  That's supposed to be a really pretty area to go through.  Overall, the Coast Starlight had the best scenery in my opinion.
• The sounds and motions of the train - I like them, there is something soothing about the train swaying and the whistle of the train.
• Seeing lots of family - I really enjoyed all of the family we saw.  Next time, we need to spend more time in Chicago since there is so much family there.  Seeing the California contingent was really nice too, since I don't see them often at all.  
• Visiting Seattle - It's a great city, and I think there is a lot we missed out on.  It's a bit more hilly than I was expecting.  The summer weather was absolutely perfect.  And the best meal I had on the entire trip was in Seattle - that steak was fantastic.
• Cheese and wine tastings on 2 trains - We actually only attended on the Empire Builder.  I'm not much of a wine drinker and really needed to choke down one of the glasses of red wine.  The cheeses were ok, but they were never identified, which I thought was a little odd.  But I did win my very own free bottle in a trivia contest (of one of the white wines).  I left it in California since dragging wine I wasn't likely to drink halfway across the country wasn't my idea of fun.  We skipped out on the wine tastings on the Coast Starlight - one was enough.
• Father-daughter bonding time - Dad and I got along remarkably well.  There were no major fights and we generally had a lot of fun.  I know this will be one of those experiences I will always remember and I'm glad I got to share it with my train-crazed dad (even if he did sleep through every single state except Delaware - and that was only because he was eating when we passed though).
• Adding lots of new states to my list - I added seven states, bringing my total to 42.

What I wasn't so much looking forward to:

• Probable lengthy delays - This didn't really happen nearly as much as I thought.  The Lake Shore Limited got in only an hour late.  The Empire Builder was the latest, but only ended up about 4 hours late.  The Coast Starlight and the Sunset Limited were both on time.  And the Crescent actually got in early.  I was prepared for much lengthier delays all around, so I was pleasantly surprised.
• The same meals over and over again on the train - it did get a bit old.  Breakfast was always either scrambled eggs or French toast.  Lunch was generally a hamburger, but one day I did have a pretty decent mac & cheese (but it was only offered on one train).  For dinners, I was able to switch it up a but more, but did have the steak numerous times.  Generally it was fine.  The one day I went for the chicken, it was so dry I had trouble eating it.  
• Train bathrooms - Not the roomiest of bathrooms.  And let's just say that air freshener is your friend.
• Dad snoring - and oh boy, does he snore.  He slept a lot, which inevitably led to snoring.  On the train, I could generally tune him out between the train noises and my ipod.  The snoring was a much bigger problem in the hotels.  Since we were sharing a room, I had a lot more difficulty blocking it out at night.  It doesn't help that he falls asleep in about 2 seconds, whereas it takes me much much longer.  It also doesn't help that I'm a light sleeper.  I tried not to get too mad since it's not really something he can control (but I do admit to feeling an unnecessarily large amount of anger at times).
• New Orleans humidity - wow, it was hot.  I have never been than hot in my entire life.  I would get out of the shower and already feel like I needed another.  It was just gross and I marvel at the people who could live there year round.
• Too much father-daughter bonding time - It wasn't as big an issue as I thought.  Yes, there were moments, but that was really to be expected.
• My stress level rising due to the timing - I have to say that I was much better at dealing with this than I thought (but does Dad agree?).  I did what I could do about the mortgage and I didn't do any school work, but that was ok, it'll all get done.  

What I hoped not to experience:

• Train-related accidents - Phew, none of those to report!
• Bustitutes - we had one at the very beginning from Boston to Albany, but we knew that ahead time and it wasn't the most exciting part of the trip.  Other than that, no issues.
• Crazy weather - For the most part, absolutely perfect.  The only rain we experienced in the entire 18 day trip was in Texas.  It was kinda neat to be surrounded by such a big storm on the train.  We had no rain in any of the cities we visited.
• Crazy train companions - nothing like the last trip with people trying to move into our rooms.  Overall, people were perfectly fine.  We did get an autographed book from one guy, had a couple pray for us at lunch one day, and spent a long dinner with one 13 year old, very outspoken girl.

Overall, I very much enjoyed this trip and will treasure the time I had.  Train travel is one of the very best ways to see the country.  I'm not sure I could do a trip of quite this length again but will certainly travel by train again in the future.  Just not this year.

Thanks Dad!

Pictures!

In case anyone is interested in the 1,222 pictures I took on this trip, they can be viewed in the following albums:

Album 1 - August 1-7 (Lake Shore Limited, Chicago, Empire Builder, Seattle)
Album 2 - August 8-14 (Coast Starlight, LA, Sunset Limited, New Orleans)
Album 3 - August 15-18 (New Orleans, Crescent)

In addition to lots of pictures of fields, mountains, and bodies of water, there are also many pictures of Dad sleeping.  Sarah wanted me to keep track of how many naps he took, so this is how I did it.  There are also a lot of random pictures of signs at train stations and water towers with town names on them.  This helped me figure out where we were when some of the pictures were taken.

Home!!

We made it home this afternoon after our final leg on the Crescent (plus a local train from New York to CT).  Our train left New Orleans bright and early on Wednesday morning.  While waiting outside the hotel for a cab, we had the good fortune to see a very large rat looking for breakfast.  Gross.  And then at the station, there were cockroaches on the sidewalk.  Double gross.  I was glad to be leaving New Orleans.  Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely city, but it was just way too hot, and the added rats and roaches didn't help things...

The train staff on this particular train were excellent.  We were warned by our sleeper car attendant on the first leg that the crews out of New Orleans weren't very good.  We found, however, that the crew we had was the very best from the entire trip.  Albert, our sleeping car attendant on the Crescent, was very friendly and efficient without being annoying.  He remembered our names and left chocolates on our beds when he made them. 

The scenery wasn't overly exceptional, but that wasn't a bad thing.  It was nice to see green and hills again after spending so much time in the desert on the previous leg.  I tried to convince dad that every empty field we traveled through in the South was a Civil War battle site, but he didn't believe me.  I can't understand why...

I got to add both Mississippi and Alabama to my list of states visited, bringing my current total to 42 states.  That's not so bad at all.  Other than that, I don't have much to say about those states.  Dad was happy to leave them, he has a particular dislike for Alabama, especially Birmingham.

We slept through South and North Carolina and southern Virginia, so I didn't really get to see much of the mountains there.  Most of my pictures from this leg, in fact, are pretty bad because the the window was dirty so my camera wanted to focus on the spots on the window rather than what was outside.  Also, the direction of the sun for much of the trip made weird glares to deal with.  I wasn't so good about taking pictures once we got north of Washington, DC - I've been that route several times either by train or car in the past and the scenery for the most part was made up of towns or trees really close to the train tracks, making for some pretty boring pictures.

One kind of weird thing about this train was that most of our meals were eaten as just the 2 of us instead of with other dining companions.  The train just wasn't that full.  That was fine with me, though, I've pretty much grown tired of the same conversations at every single meal with new people.  I've also grown tired of the menu options...

Two important things should be noted.  First, I am the Grand Champion of both Uno and Cribbage (though Dad did make a good run at coming back in both).  Second, Dad nearly killed me.  In a completely unprovoked attack on my person, Dad cut me and drew gushing blood on my leg.  At least that is the story I am going to tell.  (In reality, I probably threw something at him to get him to stop snoring or something and he tried to get back, where in the process, he scratched my leg, drawing blood.)  I hope he feels bad.

Dad is clearly jealous of my masterful Uno playing skills that he flings the cards everywhere in disgust.

My mortal wound.  I  reopened it when I took off the bandaid.  That made it hurt more than the initial scratch.

We got into Penn Station a little early and were able to switch our ticket to an earlier train to CT.  Originally, David was going to pick us up in Hartford, but he asked to pick us up in New Haven instead since he was down that way.  So we got off in New Haven (that little train was 20 minutes late, go figure) and we left for home. 

The trip was a great experience and I'll post some type of final post in the next few days, but for now I need to catch up my mail and my missed TV shows, sleep in my own bed, play with my cat, stress about my move, and get ready for school.  Welcome back to the real world!

New Orleans Happenings

We leave very early tomorrow morning for the last leg of our trip (not counting the quick NY to CT train).  The train leaves at 7 AM, so we'll be up bright and early.

New Orleans has been fun.  It really is a city that is completely unlike any other city.  In the future, however, this is not the time of year I would choose to visit.  I have never been more hot than I have the past few days.  If you know me well, you know I don't do well in the heat.  I managed to stay hydrated and not black out at all, though, so that's a positive!

After we arrived and checked in at the hotel, we took a walk through the French Quarter and ended up at Cafe Du Monde.  Dad was very good - he only had one beignet.  Of course that means I had to have two since there were 3 per serving.  It was a hardship to eat both, I assure you!

We went back to the hotel to take a little rest and cool off a bit.  During that time, the runny nose that had been a little bothersome all day decided to rear its ugly head and I found myself in the midst of a full blown head cold, complete with watery eyes, faucet-like nose, a head ache, competing bouts of being hot and cold, and just general achyness (is that a real word?).  Needless to say, it was unpleasant.  We went to CVS and picked up some medicine and soft kleenex.  There is no place for cheapo, scratchy hotel tissues when in the midst of what I was experiencing.  I went to bed early and was very pleased when I woke up the next day feeling much, much better.

Let's see, what are the big things we did...  On Monday, we took a riverboat cruise along the Mississippi River and got to see all sorts of sights, including the site of the Battle of New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward, shipping industry places, and more.  We also sailed past the Domino sugar plant.  You could smell the sugar from way out on the river.  We had a bit of an adventure docking at the end because there were crews dredging the river right by the dock so they had to make an unusual approach to the dock, which resulted in a couple failed attempts to dock.  Overall, it was a nice experience (though I managed to get sunburned on my face, while wearing sunglasses, so now I have a lovely raccoon-like tan on my face.  Oops).

Dredging the Mississippi River

We also took a trolley ride all the way out to the Garden District and back on the St. Charles line.  That was fun, and cheap.  Some of those big houses are beautiful.  Dinner was at some restaurant in the French Quarter.  We ate at about 6 PM, which is apparently much too early for New Orleans, as we were the only people in the place.  It was a little weird, but all the restaurants were like that.

On the trolley

On Tuesday, we went on the Swamp and Bayou boat tour.  We got to see lots of alligators, including one that caught a snake and then got into a scuffle with another gator.  We also had the opportunity to hold a live (baby) gator.  I had no desire to do so, but Dad did.  It was a neat tour, though I had hoped to see some of the snapping turtles.  Oh well.

The other highlight of the day was Dad playing the hero.  At least that's how he phrased it.  He apparently (I was not present for this) came upon 2 girls, each from a different local school group, fighting one another.  As he tells it, a security guard from a local store pulled off one girl when the other girl started going at her again.  Dad stepped in and pulled her off and thereby helped stop the girl fight.  He's lucky he didn't get hurt himself.  I have a strict non-involvement policy when it comes to fights, but I guess Dad doesn't share that view.  Teenage girls can be vicious when they fight, with the hair pulling and scratching...  (Sarah did rightly point out to me that Dad didn't need to worry about his hair being pulled, being that he has none.  Hee.)

All in all, New Orleans was fun though very hot and humid.  There is a lot we didn't get a chance to do, but we did a lot in the two and half days we had.  The final update will come either Thursday night or sometime on Friday after I'm home.  The trip has been fun, but I'm ready to go home.

A few more tidbits from the Sunset Limited

Now that I am fully awake, it occurs to me that there are a couple things I forgot to include in the last post...

1. In El Paso, we got to travel right along the US-Mexican border.  There is a small fence that runs along the border but then it just stopped right at the edge of some houses on the Mexican side.  It seems to me that if someone was looking to cross the border, that would be a pretty obvious place. (See picture above)  There were border control officials at a lot of the stops in Texas (and also at one of the stops in Montana from way back...).
2. I nearly forgot about the worst of all our meal companions so far.  We've probably had nearly 20 meals so far and have eaten with people from all over the country (and one guy from Canada) but this girl takes the cake.  I think she is probably the only person we've eaten with that has been younger than me - she was 13.  Her grandmother was returning her to her parents in San Antonio after a long visit - and I'm pretty sure that her grandmother was glad to be rid of her.  I like to think I am pretty tolerant of teenagers, but this girl irritated me from the very start.  She was very much a know-it-all (and also very wrong about things) - she was absolutely certain that the Salton Sea, a very large lake in Southern California, was part of the ocean because it was called a sea.  She had very strong opinions about the subjects of science (her favorite) and history (her least favorite), and was just overly opinionated.  We made certain to avoid them the rest of the trip.
3. One of my favorite railroad employees so far was the waiter we had on this train.  For the most part, the waitstaff has been good, but Riley is the tops so far.  After the train ran out of Pepsi at dinner on day 2 (ew, stuck with diet Pepsi for that meal), Riley did 2 things for me.  First, our dinner companions that night apparently had an extra can of Pepsi in their room, which they gave to Riley to give to me later that night (I guess I should thank the dinner companions more for that one).  He looked up our room number on the meal tickets and came knocking on the door with the gift.  But then at lunch on the last day, Riley took my order and then said that he'd make the Pepsi happen one way or another.  He came back with 2 small cans of soda for me from his "secret store" of soda.  I bet they came from the lounge car or something, but it was still very nice of him, even if he made fun of me for drinking soda at every single meal...

Greetings from New Orleans

We arrived yesterday into New Orleans after a completely uneventful 48 hours aboard the Sunset Limited.  Like all of the previous trains, we were in room E - the more comfortable bench seat faces backwards and the rock hard single seat faces forward.

Before this leg of the trip, it was probably the one I was least excited about.  The prospect of spending nearly 2 days crossing mostly desert wasn't exactly that exciting to me.  And indeed, the desert got pretty old pretty fast.  Yes, there is a certain beauty about the desert, but this New England girl doesn't need 2 days of it - about 2 hours would have been sufficient.  Everything was just so brown.  Even the trees and plants were a greenish-brown.  It was really depressing to me.

Perhaps Palm Springs is a nice place to visit in the winter, but I can't understand why anyone would live there in the summer.  It was unbelievably hot.  And it wasn't just hot, there was the hot wind, as well.  Yuck.

No saguaro cacti for dad - we went through much of Arizona and New Mexico during the first night, but we did see plenty of prickly pear cactus all over.  I had the Bare Necessities prickly pear line in my head the whole time.

The big excitement of the second day on the train were the rain storms that came through.  Texas hasn't gotten a lot of rain, so they needed it.  And I can't complain - it was the very first rain that we've seen in 2 weeks.  But goodness, did it come down.  This wasn't just a shower, this was a full fledged thunderstorm with lightening all around.  Because you can see forever out there, the lighting bolts clearly visible.

Toward the end of the trip, Eastern Texas and Louisiana were a lot more green.  We crossed the Mississippi River again, this time at the southern end of the river. 

I'll do a separate post when we are done in New Orleans, but we have already made the obligatory trip to Cafe Du Monde.  Delicious.  The sniffles I've had the last few days turned into a full blown cold or something last night, so that wiped out any exciting evening plans, but I'm feeling a little better today, so hopefully it was just a 24 hour thing.

For more pictures, check out the second half of this album.

LA Happenings

We leave for the train station in a few hours, on our way to New Orleans.

Here in Los Angeles, it was lots of hanging out and visiting with family, which was fun.  I slept well and ate well so life is good.  We got in on Tuesday night without any issues.  On Wednesday, Dad, Betsy, and I went to lunch at a place on the beach and then Betsy showed me around some of the funky places around Santa Monica.  On Thursday, we all went to the La Brea Tar Pits and saw the bones from animals that got stuck in the pits and in the surrounding areas.  Who knew there was some type of camel that lived here ages ago??  Aunt Kathy, Jenny, and her husband Robert came last night for dinner and we got to catch up.  It had been a very long time since I had seen Kathy and even longer since I'd seen Jenny so it was nice to get together.

Anyway, we next spend two nights on the train before reaching New Orleans.  That's a lot of desert and a lot of Texas...

Greetings from Los Angeles

Our experience on the Coast Starlight train was very good.  The train arrived in LA right on time, the first of our trains to do so.  We left Seattle on Monday morning and made our way south through Washington, Oregon, and California.  The scenery throughout was great.  There was really a little bit of everything:

The Cascades(which were even prettier in Oregon than in Washington):

More farmland:

Sunsets over the mountains:

Drier, hilly country:

The Pacific Ocean:

We even got to pull a private car at the back of our train.  This is Dad's dream trip (and at $3000 a day, it is going to remain Dad's dream trip):

The train itself was fine.  I slept surprisingly better than I though I would.  The food wasn't too bad, though I'm getting a bit tired of the limited options.  Our meal companions were mostly interesting people, including one guy who gave us a signed copy of a book he wrote.  I continue to be the superior cribbage and Uno player, though Dad is doing better than before.  The wifi on the train wasn't working, but that was ok - there was plenty of pretty scenery to keep me occupied.

LA's Union Station is a beautiful old station, probably the most attractive we've seen so far.  I think Seattle's will be nice looking but it is currently undergoing massive renovations.  I'll update on what we did in LA later on.

Pictures of the trip can be seen here (album 1) and here (album 2).  It's a lot of scenery, many pictures of Dad napping, and very little else.

Seattle Happenings

We leave for the train station in the morning to head south to LA.  Seattle is a very nice city.  The weather was absolutely perfect - sunny every day and perfect temperatures.

On Friday, we went to Pike Place Market and walked along the water (and walked and walked and walked) for while.

On Saturday, we met up with some internet friends of Dad.  Together, we tried to go on the Underground Tour, but it was sold out, so instead we walked around a bit and then (after naptime for Dad), went to Ivar's Salmon House where we had a great view of the Seattle skyline.  I had a steak since seafood is not my thing - it was delicious.

On Sunday, we did get a chance to go on the Underground Tour.  That was very interesting.  Much of the city was burned down in a fire in the 1800s and when it was rebuilt, it was basically rebuilt on top of the ruins so that it would now be above the level of the tides.  We got to walk around in the underground tunnels and see a lot of what remains from back then.  We then went to the top of the Smith Tower to look out from the observation deck.  It had some nice views of the city.  There is a 300 year old Chinese-carved chair there that legend says when a single woman sits in it, she'll be married with the year.  I chose not to sit in it.  Later, after Dad's naptime, we took the ferry to Bainbridge Island and back.  That was nice.  We finally got a good look at Mt. Rainier.  It is quite the mountain (but no Denali).

Overall, I enjoyed the city.  It was pretty easy to get around (downtown buses are free during the day - nice!) and we came at the perfect time of year.  It would be nice to stay a little longer and have time to do some of the longer day-type trips outside of the city, but I think we got a good taste of what the city has to offer.

Up next - 2 days on the Coast Starlight followed by 3 nights in LA where we'll have lots of family time with the Southern California portion of the Rosenberg/Thomas clan.

A few pictures, so far

I've taken more than 400 pictures in the last 5 days - I think I got a little carried away with scenery pictures...  I've pulled out some of the more representative pictures here.  If you really want to look at all of them, click here.

Leaving Chicago

Just for Aunt Susie

Fields in Wisconsin

Lots and lots of hay

Sunset over the Mississippi River (Minnesota)

Flooding in North Dakota

North Dakota

Eastern Montana

The Cascades

The Cascades

Amy in Seattle

Dad did this a lot.