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Non-Fiction
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| Our Train Wreck | |
| By TomOBrien | ||
| 21 March 2008 | ||
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My blog from
The Train Ride From Hell! 10:30 PM PT Tuesday 12 February 08: I'm in a train station in Emeryville, Cal. I've found a hot spot but it's a weak one. Not sure if this blog is going to go out now or a little later. Some of the people here at the train station clearly march to a different drummer. I dare say a few have their own personal percussion sections. The Adventure begins. Rushed around at Cori's apt because we had a ten or twelve block hike, schlepping our luggage yet, to the bus station where we would catch a bus to the train station in Emeryville. Emeryville is just over the Bay Bridge from San Fransico. It was a half-hour bus ride. Got to the Fricken-Fracken train station only to learn that the Fricken-Fracken train was running three, (Yes, Fricken-Fracken THREE!) hours late. THREE Fricken-Fracken hours LATE!!! Where the smuck was this train coming from? Mexico? How can the smucking thing be three hours late? I was not a happy camper. 11 PM PT: We are sittin' in the train station waitin' for the GD train to find its sorry ass way into the station so we can climb aboard for a Fricken-Frackin twenty hour train ride. (Just shoot me now!) The smucking snack bar isn't even open. The only upside I can see is that we should be able to get some sleep once we get aboard. Should say, "If and when" we get aboard? Food SF style. Ready? Working backwards from dinner tonight, we ate:Burritos in the Mission district. Ice cream sundae's at the famous Ghiradelli's, way up on Mission Hill with a beautiful view of the bay and Alcatraz Island. We rode the cable car up and that was a blast! Oyster stew, raw oysters and steamers at a sea food restaurant on Fisherman's Wharf. A superb dinner at a premier Mexican restaurant, Tres Agave's, down town. We had a great Italian dinner in Little Italy and, of course, outstanding Chinese in China Town. I also had a "Giant SFO Dog" with kraut, spicy onion sauce and deli mustard, at a hotdog stand down on Market and Powell while I waited for K and Cori to shop at the GAP. It's right where they turn the cable cars around for the trip back up Powell. (Very Cool. Pictures to follow.) All for now. Listen for the long lonesome moan of a train whistle and think of us. Stuck here in this Fricken-Fracken train station. More to follow. Cheers! ( ; 13 February 08 11:05 AM PT ON THE TRAIN!!! Got on the train about 2 AM this morning, four hours late. No biggie apparently. Not as far as AMTRAK is concerned anyway. I found out this morning that they allow themselves a twelve hour cushion. Twelve SMUCKING HOURS!!! Our sleeper is a room about ten feet long by about six feet wide. Bunk beds. I was on top. The domed ceiling was no more than a foot away from my face. I felt like I was lying in a smucking coffin!!! Fell asleep with a little help from Tylenol PM. (Better living through chemistry!) Got about six hours of light sleep. Not too awfully bad. Awoke around eight. Wandered over to the dinning car. Had a nice breakfast that consisted of eggs, potatoes and ground pork sausage all kind of mixed and scrambled together. It came with a side of thick, cold French Toast. I've had worse meals for sure. There was plenty of OJ and coffee. K got up around nine-thirty, found me in the observation car with my laptop open and searching for a hot spot. I went back with her to the dinning car to chat and have another cup while she ate breakfast. 11:45 AM PT: We are sitting in the observation car now traveling through northern California. The windows go all the way up and over about a third of the roof. Pretty cool. We are soaking in some pretty awesome views of the mountains. The close up terrain goes from scrub pine and gravel to massive boulders and rock slides. The mountainous vistas are just beautiful. AMTRAK does not own the railroad tracks that we are on. The tracks belong to Northern Pacific. So, whenever an NP freight train needs to get by we have to pull off and let the smuckers go. There are a lot of smucking NP freights on this line. We travel along at about forty or fifty miles an hour for about a half-hour or so, and then we pull over and wait ten minutes for a freight coming up behind. These hundred-and-fifty to two-hundred car freights take ten or fifteen minutes to pass. Then we wait another ten or so minutes to let it get up (or down) the grade ahead of us. Back up to fifty miles an hour for another twenty minutes or so and then we are approaching a small town where we have to slow to about ten miles an hour. This goes on for the full six hundred mile trip. (Shoot me again, please!) But wait! It gets better. LIGHTS OUT! We are already more than three hours late when this quivering, rattling, shaking hunk of junk losses electrical power. We were just south of Eugene Oregon. (We are headed to Seattle, Washington.) The engines are running fine, the train can move forward, but no electrical power. No lights, no AC, no nothing. A blacked out passenger train rolling north like a funeral procession. Or, something out of World War Two where they had to run without lights for fear of being bombed. If they had actually bombed us it would have been less painful. It was a freaking joke! Oh yeah, no dinner. The power goes out around six PM and shuts down the dinning car. "No dinner until we get the power back." They announce. "We are sorry," they add, yet again. Sorry for being behind schedule. Sorry the AC doesn't work in the lounge car even when we have power. Sorry now for the power being out. We were calling it "The Apology Train." About once every forty-five minutes or so they were apologizing for something. We pull into Eugene for what is supposed to be a ten minute stop to let passengers off and others on. But they need to smuck around with the power so it turns into a forty minute stop. We roll out of Eugene, still under blackout conditions, heading for Portland, Oregon. They apologize yet again for having no power, no air conditioning and no smucking dinner, not even crackers and cheese. Nine PM, we are a hundred miles south of Portland and two hundred miles south of our final destination, Seattle, Washington. We roll into Portland around eleven PM, now a good four hours behind schedule, all blacked out like the train of Zorro, or maybe the Count Dracula Express. This is suppose to be a half-hour stop but they again make a half-assed attempt to restore the trains electrical power and finally pull one of the two engines out of the line up and, wa-la, we have electricity!!! It's four hours to Seattle from Portland and we are moving again about ten past midnight. We were suppose to be in Seattle around ten PM on Wednesday night. We arrived at the Seattle station about four AM Thursday morning. Six hours late. Kicker. These flaming smucks make an announcement in the train station that the station will close at four fifteen AM. "Hurry up and get your checked baggage and vacate the premises cause we are closing it down folks." These morons are six smucking hours late and they are giving us fifteen minutes to get our stuff and get out of the station. Amazing stuff I'll tell you. I told one of those schmucks that, in fifty-two years of life this was my first train ride, and it would be another fifty-two years before I even think about another train ride. Having a great time in Seattle. Been on the wine tasting tour and a tour of Red Hook Brewery. C U later. . . . tom
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