Amtrakked

De-trained

2009-01-18T20:48:00.001-05:00

So uh, I'm done. Overall, this trip was pretty awesome. I highly recommend it, or at least some version of it. Like, flying out somewhere and training back might be cool. And I really want to go over the Empire Builder line from Chicago to Seattle; it goes along the Canadian coast and through some apparently kick-ass landscapes.

My random advice, if one was so inclined to take a long train trip, is as follows:

Get one of these:

Perhaps some of these:

Don't bother with these, unless you're going with someone and you want a better opportunity to get back on the Train Gang (although honestly, where is the challenge in that; gotta be coach).

When it comes to train cafe car food, don't eat too many of these:

Or ANY of these:

Do something stupid.

Ready yourself for these.

That is all. Thanks a lot for reading, whoever did. I leave you, as one should always be left, on Fire Puppy Lane. Peace out, yo.

Terrified baby

2009-01-18T20:31:00.004-05:00

This is a terrified baby. And frankly, I don't blame her for a second. Look at the closeup of my facial hair! You know that sketch at the end of Jackass 2 where they trick the dude into wearing a fake beard made out of all of their pubes? That's what I look like right now.

TrackMarks!

2009-01-17T18:38:00.000-05:00

And here they are, the Dave's Train Trip Awards, better known as the TrackMarks! (Heh. Should have named the blog that.)

Dumbest Kid Quote (doubles as cutest, I suppose, but hey, I'm nothing if not callous and mean): as we pulled into Sacramento: "Is this the trainoport?"

Worst Instance of Verbal Child Abuse: Woman who eventually got off train in Salt Lake City: "What are you doing? Oh my god, you're such a brat. You have no reason to cry. You're retarded."

Best Interaction With a non-Train Employee: guy at a Subway in Del Rio as I was paying for a sandwich: "Would you watch something like that? A football league where robots just kill each other? So you wouldn't have to worry about injuries and everything?" I answered, "Of course." He seemed satisfied.

Funniest Random Quote Heard on the Train: A woman walking down the train asking only people of a certain race if they wanted to play no-bid whist and getting turned down repeatedly: "What is with all these damn black people who don't play whist?"

Least Predictable Guy I Heard/Spoke With on the Trains: old guy on Coast Starlight who couldn't stop telling awful jokes to the other old people around him, and framed them all around two fictional "Cajun" characters named Boudreau and Thibodeaux. Seriously.

Worst Piece of Advice Received: "Try the breakfast sandwich."

Low Point: Wandering around Commerce, Calif., at 6:30 in the morning after an all-nighter of poker playing (poker losing, actually) and being forced to smell the smells of both my unshowered self and the smog-ridden east-of-LA shithole.

High Point: (Tie) Oscar's Museum of Awesomeness, and Erotic Massage in San Francisco.

Prettiest Train Ride: California Zephyr, the part from Denver all the way through to San Francisco. Hot shit.

Ugliest Train Ride: I'll go with the Capitol Limited, from DC to Chicago. There are probably some nice bits going through the Appalachians, but it was dark for those so all I got to see was fucking Gary, Indiana.

(and on a similar note) Things I Wish it Had Been Daytime Out When We Passed By: sunset over the pacific, Appalachia, the Salton Sea in California, bridge over the Pecos River in Texas (highest in the US, I think)

I'll wrap up this soon-to-be-award-winning piece of classic literature tomorrow night maybe, but all I've got left is a short trip back from Williamsburg to Philly.

I'm generally not this patient...

2009-01-16T08:14:00.003-05:00

Someone asked me the other day for a general description of what riding these long-haul trains is like. And since one person (could possibly have been my mom) asked, that means EVERYONE IN THE WORLD wants to know.

First of all, it's less boring than it seems like it should be. I think this is probably because I had no particular destination and the point of the trip was largely the train ride itself, but still--I haven't really been bored on the trains at all. You end up framing a long trip (my longest rides have been just short of 30 hours) based on certain things you'll do over the course of the day. Like, okay, in a few hours I'll go grab some dinner in the cafe car, then I'll sit there for a while and drink a beer and see if anyone interesting is around to talk to, and then I'll come back to my seat, read for a while or watch a movie and then I'll try and sleep. That sequence then goes by pretty quickly.

And maybe this is also because this hasn't been a destination-oriented trip, but I have spent retarded amounts of time staring out the window and taking pictures. I woke up around 7 in the morning when we stopped in Denver, and didn't really do anything else but stare until I stopped in Glenwood Springs seven hours later. I don't know what happened.

The downsides tend to be the people in your car who can't modulate the volume of their voice, or just think that everyone should hear what they have to say. These are inevitably the people who have nothing to say whatsoever. There was a woman sitting behind me yesterday who had astonishingly loud phone conversations, the last of which before she got off somewhere in Georgia consisted of multiple repetitions of "Jane, I just love riding the train, it's so PEACEful!" There wasn't a hint of irony in her screams.

Anyway, the delivery may be awful, but she's kind of right. It's a nice way to travel when you're not pressed for time. Or showers. My sister is about to pick me up in Alexandria and I'm on the tail end of a three-day shower-free run. My six-month-old niece will not be the smelly one in the car.

Strange pink buildings

2009-01-15T19:56:00.000-05:00

Can someone please tell me what the hell this building is? Honestly, it's among the most confusing structures I've ever seen.

You know what that building needs? It needs to be...

4:30 am is no time for crappy music

2009-01-15T11:51:00.005-05:00

Volume up for full effect...

(I have no idea why "t" shows up in the credits instead of "to." I tried to fix this like six times. Whatever.)

Hooray for the south

2009-01-14T17:36:00.003-05:00

I was in Mississippi for 5 minutes before seeing two white cops searching the pulled-over car of two young black men. Impressive stereotype living-up-to, south.

Creativity

2009-01-13T21:00:00.003-05:00

I am currently sitting at a bar in the French Quarter, drinking a hurricane, eating gumbo and listening to a guy play jazz flute.* I am the most cliché man in the UNIVERSE!

*actually, guitar.

Trains tend to run past crappiness

2009-01-13T19:44:00.006-05:00

For all the natural beauty one gets to see from these trains I've been riding, it's also quite noticeable how the tracks tend to run past an inordinate amount of factories, oil refineries and dilapidated craptacular houses. The tracks are generally very old, so I guess it just means that nicer stuff doesn't get built near something so loud and intrusive as a train. Makes sense I suppose, but it still sucks.

Leftover prettiness

2009-01-13T11:46:00.000-05:00

Some random pictures from the last couple of trains I've been on. 'Cause hey, why not.

Athletes in Train-ing

2009-01-12T19:55:00.000-05:00

Here's today's train-related idea: in this carbon emission-challenged, economically disastrous world we live in, I think a professional sports franchise should do the bulk of its traveling to games (like, anything within 800-1000 miles or something) on Amtrak. They could film all of it, HBO Hard Knocks-style, and have a show about the wacky antics that the athletes get into on long, boring, uncomfortable train rides to Charlotte or wherever.

I think some ideal choices would be the Oklahoma City Thunder, just because they deserve whatever hardships the world has to offer; the Baltimore Ravens, because Ray Lewis would require an entire baggage car to himself in order to practice his retarded dance; and the Cincinnati Bengals, because we could wager on how many of them would manage to get arrested while actually on board a train. Fun!

Del Rio and Further Alcoholic Incidents

2009-01-11T16:42:00.011-05:00

So, Del Rio. It's, um, not really worth visiting. I chose to stop here because it's about half way between LA and New Orleans, and I wanted to see some random place that I would otherwise never end up visiting. I was hoping for a desert-y, interesting border town, but mostly it just has fast food and insurance companies. Although two of them are the funniest insurance companies in the history of the world.

Tomorrow I'll take a walk a bit farther afield and hopefully will see something mildly more interesting than Church's Chicken, but for now, yeah, thumbs down to Del Rio, Texas.

Also, I added to my alcoholosm-related incidents early today: I was at a gas station convenience story buying a gatorade and saw that they had six-packs of beer in there too. I thought, hey, beer! I'm about to go sit in my motel room and watch football, might as well drink some beer too. So I opened the freezer and reached for a six-pack, when a timid voice emanated from behind the beverages.

"Noon."

I then noticed that there was a small Mexican man filling the freezer with 12-packs of Keystone Light (for when regular Keystone just isn't piss-like enough). I didn't know what he meant. "I'm sorry?" I said.

"You can't buy beer before noon," he said.

"Oh," I said. "What time is it now?"

"Eleven," he said. I put the beer back. Stupid Texas. You're in danger of joining Utah on my list.

Adventures in Not Sleeping

2009-01-11T12:25:00.007-05:00

I arrived in LA at around 9:30 pm on Thursday night. My train heading back east to Texas was scheduled to leave the next day at 2:30 pm. I didn't really feel like getting a motel room for the night. So I went to the Commerce Casino and played poker until 5 in the morning instead. I know, rational and constructive decision making is the best.

I started strong and was up around $180, but then bled slowly for hours and ended up down about $120. So, I could have just gotten a decent hotel room and slept for the same amount. Also, this happened:

(You're LOVING the effects, right?)

All that being said, don't think for a second that I'm not doing the exact same thing for the 12 hours I have in New Orleans in a couple of days. And Harrah's is only a short walk from the train station! Walk around the French Quarter, drink a hurricane or two, and gamble until my train leaves early the next morning. Bad experiences clearly don't teach me much.

Coast Starlight, You Had Me at Hello

2009-01-11T11:23:00.005-05:00

You know what's in the spot normally reserved for the baggage storage room on the Coast Starlight train down to LA? A fucking arcade room. I almost lost my shit when I saw it.It's really kind of amazing. There are four old arcade games just sitting in there, and if you think that after finding it I didn't spend the next hour playing my way across the entire country in the original Cruisin' USA, then, well, I guess you don't know me very well. I don't think I had ever played that whole game before, 'cause I was pleased to find that after making it through the Washington D.C. course you get the following "political cartoon" featuring Bill Clinton in a hot tub:

Honestly, if you asked me to make a list of things that I would classify as "pleasant surprises," I'm pretty sure an arcade room on a train would make the top 10, even if it doesn't have a game less than 15 years old.

Terrified in Oakland

2009-01-11T11:03:00.002-05:00

Here's what I looked like while sitting in a ridiculously shady diner-type place near the Amtrak station in a remote, desolate area of Oakland:I was scared of pretty much everything at that moment: the food I was about to eat (ended safely), the possibility that I would get killed walking back across the street to the station (also ended safely), and the possibility that I would have to drop a deuce back at the disgusting station bathroom if I did make it across the street alive (also ended safely; travel mode!!!).

Catching up...

2009-01-11T11:01:00.002-05:00

So I went without internet access for three or four days there, and now have a lot of catching up to do. I'm currently at a motel in Del Rio, Texas (as strange and random as it sounds), but the next few posts back up all the way to Oakland. In case you care.

Homework assignment

2009-01-09T22:37:00.002-05:00

Here is our new project: what is the name of the train equivalent for the Mile-High Club? Discuss.

(Or, don't discuss, 'cause it's not like that many people are really reading this. Either way.)

My preliminary suggestion:

The Train Gang
ie,
"dude, we totally got back on the Train Gang."

Anthropology

2009-01-08T18:55:00.000-05:00

One of my goals for this trip was to figure out who exactly rides these long-ass trains. My preliminary conclusion is as follows: old people, students from weird colleges like Wyoming Polytech or something, and stupid people. The majority of people I have spoken with have been elderly men. The majority of people I have HEARD speaking -- like, way too loudly on phones, way too loudly while half-heartedly smacking their four-year-old child, way too loudly to no one in particular -- appear to have an average IQ of 73.

The major downside to this realization is that if those are the only categories, then I have vastly overestimated my own intelligence.

West coast respite

2009-01-08T06:36:00.001-05:00

My two-day break from trains included some super fun time with Eph and Will here in San Francisco. I received a delicious beer and a giant "2" candle for my birthday, witnessed/partook in plenty of good old-fashioned homo-eroticism, and saw Will's sexy hang-over pose. Can't beat that, really.

Off down the coast to LA Thursday morning, at which point I will do something that is either incredibly stupid or incredibly awesome. Details to follow later.

Train food

2009-01-07T22:58:00.001-05:00

Yesterday morning, I woke up around 730 (or something, I don't know what time zone we were in), remembered that it was my birthday, and headed to the dining car to treat myself. I don't mind the crappy snack bar food for lunch and dinner on these trains, but the other day I had a breakfast sandwich and almost puked on the elderly gentleman sitting next to me in the sightseer lounge. It was awful. So I figured, hey, if I'm going to waste money on a meal on the train at some point, it might as well be breakfast and it might as well be on my birthday. Away I went.

I sat with, of course, some old dudes. They were from Chicago and had a sleeper car, meaning that meals in the dining car are included. They spent much of the meal watching train employees wander past us and debating if they were pulling their weight and were doing a good job. Odd. The meal was decent, although the bacon I had tasted sort of gamey and strange. I couldn't help but note the train's proximity to the Donner Pass, as well as the overnight disappearance of the woman sitting across the aisle from me. Hm.

Oscar's Museum of Awesomeness

2009-01-07T17:32:00.004-05:00

This is Oscar. Oscar the Octogenarian. Oscar, who retired from his federal government job years ago, has worked in the Glenwood Railway Museum since it opened about five years ago. The “museum” has two rooms inside the building that houses the Glenwood Springs Amtrak station, and features a model train set in the middle of the room and various train paraphernalia around the walls. Oscar told me that he first got interested in trains when he rode them around a lot in the years soon after World War II. So when the chance to work in the museum came up, he jumped at it. If you step into the museum, chances are Oscar will follow you around and describe whatever it is you happen to glance at. “That’s a steam whistle from 1921. It has four chambers so a skilled conductor could almost play a song. Station managers got so they could tell who was coming in on a train by the whistle.” And so on.

Glenwood Springs is about halfway along the two-day California Zephyr line between Chicago and San Francisco, so it is more common for trains to be delayed coming in than it is for them to be on time. It seems that the museum is there just so people like me can have something to do other than sit on broken benches for an hour or two while waiting. But don’t tell Oscar.

Random vitriol

2009-01-06T01:22:00.001-05:00

Man, do I hate Utah.

Dead animal-free post

2009-01-04T22:31:00.009-05:00

I took a lot of pictures on the Denver-Glenwood Springs leg, while trying to avoid paying attention to the minor acts of child abuse going on across the aisle. Here are two (pictures, not acts of child abuse).

That was... unexpected

2009-01-04T21:34:00.005-05:00

The route from Chicago to Denver is uneventful, at best (see previous post), but luckily it goes by over night so you don't need to care. Past Denver things get interesting, with gorgeous views for hundreds of miles and -- SWEET MERCIFUL JEHOSEPHAT IS THAT A FROZEN DEER'S HEAD STICKING UP OUT OF THE SNOWED OVER RIVER???!!!!????
Yes. Yes it is.

Amtrak fails to join the early 20th century

2009-01-03T19:22:00.001-05:00

Trains on the Northeast Corridor routes tend to have electrical outlets at every seat. Imagine the convenience! Long haul trains, though, do not. In fact, only a couple of seats in each car have an outlet, and there are two in the dining car, maybe. Which of course makes perfect sense, considering that every fucking person on every fucking train is constantly using between two and sixteen electronic devices, none of which can last remotely close to the 16-52 hours that these trains run from beginning to end. Well done Amtrak. Whores.

Equations

2009-01-03T18:43:00.004-05:00

Central Illinois = boring
Western Illinois = boring
Iowa (all of it) = boring*

*this is a prediction rather than a report, but I feel pretty good about it

Of Not-tards, broken seats and bourbon

2009-01-03T11:34:00.013-05:00

My first long train ride (DC to Chicago) seemed mildly cursed from the start. We were delayed in boarding by about an hour or a bit more, and when we finally did get on the train, some weirdness started. Passengers going a long way on the train (probably Pittsburgh or beyond) were given little slips of paper with seat assignment numbers on them. I followed a family of three up to the door and was given seat 21. I headed upstairs and found the seat, but a man with a strangely small guitar case next to him was already sitting there.

“Um, sorry sir, but I think you might be in my seat,” I said, holding up the flow of people behind me. “Unless we got the same number by accident or something.” It’s a weakness of mine: I always try and give people outs.

The man stared up at me, maybe mumbled something, but then just looked out the window.

“Sir? Did you get a seat assignment?” I asked.

“A what?” I should stress that this man was not visibly retarded. Just throwing that out there.

“A seat assignment,” I said again, holding up my yellow slip of paper with “21” written on it. “Did you get one?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said, and turned back to the window. At this point about three people in the aisle behind me tried to chime in and tell him what a seat assignment is. Again, and I can’t stress this enough – he was not retarded.

“Um…” I was at a loss. “Maybe you should go ask the guy outside about your seat assignment?” He ignored this suggestion, from me and the woman behind me, literally three separate times. Finally he turned back and said, “I’ll just wait for the guy to come up here and he can tell us what to do.” He was polite the entire time, but repeated that plan of action maybe three times. Eventually the woman behind me went back down the stairs and got the conductor, who came back up and asked the guy for a seat assignment.

“What?” asked Mr. Mini-Guitar Player.

“Did you get assigned a seat?”

“A guy out there just told me to come up here and sit down, that’s all I know,” he said. The conductor then asked where he was headed, to which the guy pulled out a ticket and tried to show it to him. “Just tell me where you’re going, that’s all,” said the conductor.

A long pause. “Oh. Cumberland?”

At which point it was determined that the man was in the wrong car and needed to move, which he did. See what happened there? See how this long, drawn-out story has a meaningless and humorless punchline? Fun, right? Yeah. Then, the recline button on my seat didn’t work. Maybe the mini-guitar broke it.

On the bright side of things for this leg of the trip, I brought a small bottle of Jack Daniels purchased at the station in DC with me, and enjoyed some nice Jack and Cokes in lounge car (or something) listening to two rednecks discuss football and military service. The bright side had a downside though: I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alcoholic as when an Amtrak conductor told me I can’t bring liquor on to a train, and that I needed to “hide that shit.”

Honestly, I’m a little confused about this policy: they sell beer and wine on the train, and passengers are more than welcome to bring other food and drink items with them. Why not booze?

This has been a long and rambling post, but here are my lessons from the first long leg of a very long trip: if you insist on taking your assigned seat from a weirdo, the seat will probably be broken; and if you bring booze on a train, don’t offer some to the conductor. He doesn’t want any.

Great start

2009-01-02T16:00:00.002-05:00

"there will be a delay in boarding due late makeup equipment"?

What the fuck does that mean?

Before and After

2009-01-02T14:40:00.005-05:00

Here's what I look like today, the first day of my trip, sitting in Union Station in DC after a tame first leg and a stop at the Museum of Sadness and Oppression -- sorry, the National Museum of the American Indian:
And here is my guess for what I will look like in a couple of weeks, after more than 150 hours on trains:
On to Chicago in an hour or so.

Amtrak and Me

2008-12-29T14:52:00.002-05:00

Hello, people who aren't too turned off by the idea of someone's personal travel blog to have left after reading the header above. How's it going.

In a few days, Amtrak and I are about to have a brief, torrid affair. It will begin, I hope, quite passionately, and progress toward comfort and complacency within four or five days. At that point we'll start to have some fights about who left the dishes in the sink or why I fell asleep immediately after sex - without even a HINT of cuddling - and we'll take a couple of days to ourselves, just to think things through. But we'll miss each other terribly, in the F. Scott Fitzgerald, swoony alcoholic sort of way, and we'll commence another three days of blissful companionship. It will be the kind of period where you go on walks and picnics and sigh in the general direction of sunsets.

Then, Texas.

Finally, we will spend a day or two discussing the future, and how our plans really do differ fairly drastically (culinary school? Honestly, Amtrak, be realistic), and it would probably be best for both of us if we go our separate ways. By the end, I expect to think back on my days with Amtrak as a tumultuous but happy growth experience. My future relationships with private-but-government-subsidized-yet-still-constantly-on-the-verge-of-utter-financial-collapse travel entities will be fuller, more mature as a result. I'll drink a glass of scotch in 15 years and wonder what ever happened to Amtrak, until my wife of six years at that point, Southwest Airlines, asks me sleepily what I'm thinking about as I stare into the fire. I'll smile, check my second piece of luggage for free, and kiss her goodnight.

So if you're not bored yet, I'll be jumping aboard the first train from Philly on the morning of January 2.