Old North Church (Boston) and William Bradford Memorial (Plymouth)
Amtrak Northeast Direct -- New Haven, Connecticut
Amtrak Northeast Direct -- New Haven, Connecticut
For many years I've thought it would be fun to take a vacation by train. While I'd heard horror stories from some people about the awful schedule problems on Amtrak, I also had heard it was a pleasant, leisurely way to travel. This year I finally managed to work an Amtrak holiday into my schedule, and in August my sister Margaret and I set off for the East Coast on the train.
In addition to being a train getaway, this vacation would also be a trip back to our roots. Both sides of our family have been in America for hundreds of years, and on this journey we would be heading through the native turf of our ancestors--the farmland of upstate New York and the shores of the Atlantic at Plymouth Rock. It's sometimes awkward to be a fourteenth generation American. While more recent immigrants have a tie to "the old country", our family left England at the time of Shakespeare and hasn't looked back since. I've never felt especially close to my ancestors or really thought much about what they went through when they founded a new land. Their history is our country's history, though, and this trip really brought it alive for me.
FRIDAY, August 4
Algona, Iowa to Cedar Rapids, Iowa
I put the finishing touches on the first thorough housecleaning I'd done in ages, and was out the door around 8:00 this morning. I had breakfast at McDonalds, stopped briefly at Garrigan and Iowa Lakes to take care of a bit of business in both of my jobs, and then headed out on the highway.
I had a pretty leisurely morning, stopping to shop repeatedly along the route. This weekend, for the first time ever, Iowa was holding a "sales tax holiday", where clothing would be exempt from tax. Many stores had scheduled their summer clearances to coincide with this date, and I took them up on the bargains.
As I headed down to Cedar Rapids, I noticed something I've been admiring all summer long--wildflowers. The flowers have been absolutely spectacular this year, blooming in glorious shades of gold, purple, and red. I think the state has done less spraying and mowing than in past years. Whatever the reason, though, all along I-380 there was a beautiful carpet of blossoms.
The other thing I noticed along the interstate was a steady stream of brand new school buses headed north. The buses almost certainly originated in my hometown of Mt. Pleasant, where Bluebird has its Midwest factory. When I was growing up, Bluebird was the largest employer in town. These days the Wal-Mart distribution center has far surpassed them, but they're obviously still cranking out plenty of buses.
I had lunch at the Country Kitchen in Marion. They were quite busy, and I overheard the waitresses talking about how many people there were. Apparently everybody had the same idea I did about shopping for bargains on tax-free day, and an awful lot of them were eating out. Country Kitchen hadn't bargained on this, so two waitresses were stuck with a restaurant full of people.
Around 2:30 I checked in at the Exel Inn in Cedar Rapids. This is not a hotel I'd recommend to anyone reading this. It's awkward to get to (hidden behind a McDonalds and an Econolodge), the rooms are small and very basic, and it's not kept very clean (there was mold in the shower and a big stain on the carpet of my room). For the same rates (in the low 40s per night) there are much better hotels in Cedar Rapids.
One thing that was nice at the Exel was the air conditioning, and I cooled off for a while while reading the local paper. The big news story was that Qwest (the telephone company that has formerly been known as both U.S. West and Northwestern Bell) was laying off thousands of employees.
After a while I drove down to my Aunt Alaire's apartment in Coralville. There I met Margaret and her friend Vicki Cline. The four of us had dinner at a nice Mexican restaurant in Washington (Dos Amigos), and afterwards we drove to the Dairy Mart at the Ainsworth Corner on old highway 218. I hadn't been to (or even thought of) the Dairy Mart in a good 15 years. When I was growing up, Dairy Mart (a ma 'n' pa fast food joint) was literally the only restaurant between Iowa City and Mt. Pleasant, and we often stopped there on the way to or from visiting our relatives. The place is still going strong (and will soon be celebrating its 50th anniversary), and lots of people exit the new "Avenue of the Saints" to go there for ice cream or sandwiches.
I drove Alaire back to her apartment. On the way we had a nice chat, and it amazed me how well she is hearing these days. My aunt has had a hearing problem most of her life, which has become severe as she got older. About a year ago she had an implant in her ear, and since then she has gone through rehabilitation training--and the results are impressive. While she would still not claim to hear "normally", she was able to carry on a conversation above the din of my very noisy car. That's definite progress.
It was quite late when I got back to the Exel Inn. I watched a bit of news on TV, and before long it was time to settle into bed.
SATURDAY, August 5
Cedar Rapids, Iowa to somewhere in Indiana
I got up around 6:45 this morning and had a brief walk through the industrial park next to the motel. I bought breakfast at McDonalds and barely made it back to my motel room before it started to rain. It poured buckets--with hail and lightning. At one point the power even went out at the motel. It returned shortly, and eventually the rain let up a bit. Finally around 9:00 I was on my way southward.
I drove down to Olds, where Margaret's friend Vicki lives. It used to be a long, awful drive from Cedar Rapids to Olds. The roads were narrow and winding, and there was no choice but to go straight through Iowa City. Now Avenue of the Saints (I-380 and US-218) makes a straight four-lane shot from C.R. southward. It seemed as if I had hardly set off before I was in Olds. In fact I arrived too early--well before I had said I would. I killed a bit of time by having coffee at a convenience store just outside of town before heading on to Vicki's.
I was a little surprised when I got to Vicki's and no one was there. I circled the block couple of times, and eventually both Vicki and Margaret drove up. They had stayed at the home of one of Vicki's co-workers (which was air conditioned) last night, and this morning they were at the school Vicki teaches at, where Margaret was using the computer lab to furiously finish a set of reaction papers for a class she had taken this summer.
Vicki drove us down to the depot in Mt. Pleasant (which is Iowa's largest Amtrak station--since it is the closest the trains get to Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Waterloo, and the Quad Cities). The station hasn't changed one bit since I was a child. What has changed is the Mt. Pleasant Junior High, which used to be a block south of the station on Adams Street, but whose additions have extended it to become a next-door neighbor. The old brick box I went to (a turn-of-the-century monstrosity with a collapsing roof and sagging floors) has been renovated and now is dwarfed by additions that extend south, east, and north. They've torn down the string of annexes (which were nothing more than run-down old houses that served as classrooms for art, home ec, foreign language, and the like) and put up nice new athletic fields and tennis courts. Twenty-five years ago the whole neighborhood should have been condemned, but today it's really a rather pleasant area.
Amtrak's sole employee in Mt. Pleasant is a very pleasant woman who looks like my sister-in-law Janet. She checked our baggage through to Boston and then looked up the train's status on her computer. The train was running quite late (which is fairly common on this route, which originates in San Francisco and has lots of opportunities to fall behind schedule on its three-day trip to Chicago), so she advised us to have lunch and stop back again around 1:00.
We had lunch at Jerry's, a Mt. Pleasant institution I hadn't been to since I was in high school. It's a pizza parlor and steakhouse, which also hasn't changed much since I was growing up. The one thing that has changed is that they've added a bar. Twenty years ago there were only two bars in the entire city, and even today it's still much drier than the Catholic towns I've gotten used to up north.
I picked up a copy of the Mt. Pleasant News, where I learned that John Freeland, who was assistant principal (the man nobody liked who was in charge of discipline) when I was a schoolboy had now become the mayor of Mt. Pleasant. The paper also runs a column by Christie Vilsack, the former English teacher that I had a major crush on in seventh grade. Since then, of course, "Miss Bell" has gone on to become the wife of the Governor of Iowa.
Vicki drove us back to the train station where we waited some more. The train was due in Mt. Pleasant around 11:30, and it eventually showed up at 2:05. With the train's tardiness, we were a little concerned about whether we would make our connection in Chicago, but as we were boarding, the conductor assured us that there would be no problem. Apparently it is common practice to hold departure of trains to the East until the trains from the West have arrived.
Amtrak's California Zephyr is quite a train. The train was long (although only on our return trip would we realize just how long), and each car individually was enormous. The train runs across the mountains, and the coaches are definitely designed for viewing the scenery. Each car is double-decked, with most of the seating on the top, where you can see out clearly. Down below they have luggage storage, toilets, and special seating for the handicapped.
If you've ever flown or ridden a long-distance bus, it's a definite step up the first time you set foot in a train. There is so much more room you really can't even compare it with other forms of transportation. The physical size of the seats is equivalent to business class on airlines (at least from what I've glimpsed walking back to the cramped cheap seats on the plane). They recline way back, and they are set far enough apart that even a tall person has lots of legroom. The aisle is spacious--quite a bit wider than those airplane aisles where the drink cart barely fits. It's also nice to have huge windows you can gaze out of as you relax and enjoy the scenery. Not every train is as nice as the California Zephyr (which is Amtrak's most popular long-distance run and definitely one of the stars of its fleet), but they're all nicer than a bus or plane--for the same money or less.
The train picked up speed gradually as we headed east from the Mt. Pleasant depot. Here we got more insight into how my old hometown has changed. The train runs right through the industrial park east of town, which has at least tripled in size since I left town. Wal-Mart, whose warehouse already extends for nearly a mile, is in the process of doubling the size of their facility. I've heard that they're expecting the 2000 census to reveal a population of over 10,000 (it was just 7,000 thirty years ago), and many more commute here from places like Burlington and Keokuk.
East of Mt. Pleasant the main thing we saw was construction. Right now they're building two super-highways across southeast Iowa. Avenue of the Saints will be a limited-access route running just east of Mt. P., while the "Southeast Connector" will extend eastward from Ottumwa to Burlington to provide southeast Iowa with its first direct link to Des Moines. The two routes will interchange just east of Mt. Pleasant, and they're moving tons of earth to make it happen.
It amused me to see all this construction. Not long ago I happened to come across a copy of Iowa 2000, a regional planning document that was the result of a series of community meetings back in 1974. I remember going to an Iowa 2000 meeting as a class assignment in sixth grade. Both of these highways were planned clear back then (when Interstate 80 had just been completed). Until very recently the only part of it that was completed was I-380 from Iowa City to Waterloo. You can't discount the power of politics, though. We elected a governor from Mt. Pleasant (who happens to be of the same party as the President and hence the Secretary of Transportation), and finally southeast Iowa is getting its share of the road money.
Once the train picked up speed, it cruised along at least as fast as highway traffic. Before long we reached Burlington. The train slows down as it passes the decrepit old factories downtown and then turns sharply right next to the river, where the Burlington depot is located. This stop, like most on Amtrak, seemed needlessly long. Eventually, though, we were started moving again, turned sharp left, and headed across the Mississippi.
The land became flatter and swampier in Illinois. Just west of home many people are talking about drought, but here if they've obviously had too much rain.
For no reason we could figure out the train stopped in the middle of nowhere about ten miles west of Galesburg. Margaret and I got bored looking at the same wet field, so we decided to set out to explore the train. That was easier said than done, because one thing Amtrak doesn't provide that they really should is a guide of where to find things on the train. As novices to the train, we were pretty clueless as to where anything was.
It turns out that pretty much every train has the same basic layout. Behind the engines (this train had three engines) are the checked baggage cars. Following those are the sleepers--which are equivalent to first class on an airplane. These are divided into separate rooms for anywhere from one to six people. The seats convert into beds like the tables in a camper. The privacy and comfort commands premium prices--nearly double what we paid. Next up is the dining car (which is absent from some trains), where formal meals are served in a restaurant setting. Behind that is the lounge car (also sometimes called "cafe car" or "dinette"). The lounge car serves relatively inexpensive sandwiches, snacks, and drinks (coffee, tea, pop, juice, beer, wine, and hard liquor), as well as a small assortment of products such as you might find in a convenience store. There are always a few tables where you can eat what you buy, and they often show videos for the kids. On double-decker trains like this, the top level of the lounge car is the "view dome", with seats set sideways to admire the scenery.
The dining and lounge cars separate the sleepers from the coaches. The coaches--a.k.a. the cheap seats--were where we always sat. They seat people interestingly in the coaches. When you board they ask your destination, and you are directed to a specific coach depending on where you're going. We found out over the course of our travels that the short-haul passengers are generally seated in the most forward coach, while those going a long way (Chicago to Boston, for example) are at the very rear of the coach section. There is some logic to this. People pass through the coaches in front of them on their way to the lounge and dining cars. By seating people this way, those going the longest distance will be less often disturbed by traffic and thus have a little bit better chance to sleep.
Typically behind the coaches there are even more cars. These carry mail and freight, and Amtrak uses the revenue from these operations to keep fares reasonable for its passengers. The total length of most trains is quite long--and in general, the further a train is going, the longer it is likely to be. We never counted cars on this train, but we did on the westbound Zephyr when we returned. That train had no less than twenty-two cars ... and I felt terribly sorry for all the automobiles that had to stop at grade crossings waiting for it to pass by.
That length is part of the problem with the long stops. Mt. Pleasant was one of several places the Zephyr actually stopped twice, rather than just once. First it stopped to let passengers on and off in the sleepers. Then it pulled forward so that the coaches were at the platform. Just making that extra stop probably adds three or four minutes of travel time for an already delayed train.
We had what turned out to be our supper in the lounge car on the California Zephyr. They were selling microwaved White Castle hamburgers, and Margaret and I each had a pair of the slimy little sandwiches. We returned to our car and did a bit of people watching--mostly gawking at a group of students who had probably just graduated from high school that were seated toward the front of our car. They had obviously been riding for quite a long distance, and they were making quite a party out of this road trip. Both Margaret and I recognized similarities with specific students we taught among those at the front of the car.
Before too long we reached Aurora, the start of Chicagoland. It was right at rush hour, and scads of Metra commuter trains raced by us on the westbound tracks as we headed eastward across the suburbs. Eventually the condos and industrial parks gave way to brick block homes and aging factories as we headed through Cicero and finally into Chicago. Inside the city limits the vistas were even less glamorous, with mostly rail yards and graffiti-covered viaducts. I was appalled to see a homeless man who was living under an overpass of the Stevenson Expressway. I have certainly seen homeless people on the street before, but only in movies have I seen people actually living in conditions such as this.
We pulled into Union Station in Chicago at 6:45 (a little over three hours late). As the train was stopping, an announcement told us that the Lake Shore Limited, the train we needed to transfer to, was waiting on the next track. We were advised to walk to the end of the platform, turn right, and go directly out the next platform to the train. Once we stopped, we had less than fifteen minutes before the other train was scheduled to leave. We dashed out of the car and navigated through the mob on the platform like rush hour drivers on the freeway. Being in coach, we were toward the back of the train, so it was a long walk up to the end of the platform. Once we got there we quickly turned right and headed (with many of our fellow Zephyr passengers) for the next platform. We were all abruptly stopped by a very rude Amtrak employee who told us that the train on that platform was not the Lake Shore Limited, but rather the Texas Eagle. When we asked where we should go, he simply said (quite gruffly), "the Lake Shore is delayed."
We made our way through a sea of humanity to the main part of the station. Once there, we checked the schedule TVs, which confirmed that the train was indeed delayed. What the TVs said for our train (and almost every other train listed) was "DELAY DUE TO LATE INCOMING EQUIPMENT". No length was given for the delay, nor any further explanation. As our wait grew longer, we asked several Amtrak employees (at the information desk, the passenger services center, and ticketing). With only one exception (the ticket agent), the station employees in Chicago were extremely rude, and without exception all of them gave us the royal run-around as to what was up with our train.
Each time we asked an employee, the story as to why the train was delayed changed. First we were told they were waiting for equipment to arrive from an incoming train--which is, of course, what it said on the TVs. This was obviously a lie, for two reasons. First, Chicago is Amtrak's primary storage yard. There is enough equipment parked there to make up a dozen trains. Second, all the incoming trains they were waiting for were short-run trains like the "Ilini", which sends about a half dozen cars from Carbondale to Chicago. None of them would have the kind of equipment necessary for an overnight trip to the East.
The next story was the schedule had been goofed up by the late arrival of the incoming train from Los Angeles. Departure of the Lake Shore had been pushed back so passengers from that train could make their connection. (In fact, the L.A. train had a good reason for being late; an elderly passenger had died on the way to Chicago, and they were delayed by the details of dealing with that.) We actually believed that story until we spoke with a man who was a passenger on the train from L.A. It turned out that train had actually arrived about half an hour before our train had.
Other employees spoke vaguely of "equipment problems", "mechanical trouble", and "safety considerations". No one wanted to give a specific time frame for the delay. Each time we pressed someone as to how much longer it would be, the response was "half an hour". Half an hour later, it was still a vague "half an hour" delay. All those half hours ended up adding up to a very long four hour wait.
Virtually everyone who was waiting agreed that the real problem was that we didn't know what the problem was or how long the wait would be. Had anyone in Chicago been up front with us, we probably would have accepted the delay. Instead, they had a bunch of very angry passengers who felt quite justifiably that they had been given the shaft.
While we were waiting we met a number of our fellow train passengers. One of them was getting particularly frustrated. Her name was Betty, and she lived in a small town in eastern Ohio. She apparently takes the train frequently from Cleveland to visit friends and relatives in the West. She was now returning home, and she had arranged for her son to pick her up at the station in Cleveland. The train is scheduled to go through eastern Ohio in the middle of the night, and she was far less than happy at the prospect of her son driving into Cleveland after midnight and then waiting futilely for her to arrive.
It certainly did not help the mood in the waiting lounge that Amtrak had recently introduced a "satisfaction guaranteed" policy. In the historic "Great Hall" at Union Station they have an enormous banner proclaiming that if something goes wrong, they will do "whatever it takes" to make things right. Obviously word of that policy had not yet filtered down to the Chicago station staff. A train full of people was getting perilously close to demanding that the Amtrak big-wigs make good on their pledge.
In addition to getting bored and annoyed, Margaret and I were also getting very hungry. White Castle burgers are very small, and that's all we had eaten since 11:00 this morning. While there were restaurants in the station, they were a long way from the departure lounge, and we (like many other passengers) were afraid to go there for fear our train would be called while we were eating. When the delay lasted beyond 10pm, Amtrak finally broke down and realized they had to do something to keep us from rioting. They hauled out bags of tortilla chips, cans of pop, and bottles of water; and they passed them out to the waiting passengers. I don't think there was anyone there who felt a dollar's worth of free food was going to make up for the aggravation the Chicago station staff had created, but we all queued up for our hand-outs.
Needless to say, while we were in line for the freebies, they finally released the train for boarding. We all crushed toward the departure gate, and from there made our way to the cars. There was no one at the gate to direct us to specific cars, so we asked an employee on the platform. He directed us to the wrong car--one toward the front of the train that was assigned to passengers going to New York City. The car attendant there snapped at us for getting on the wrong car. When we told him that was where we had been told to go, he would have none of it. We had to go clear back to the rear of the train to find a car headed for Boston.
The train finally left the platform at 10:48pm (it was scheduled to depart at 7:00). After just a minute or two, we stopped in the rail yards just south of the station, where they attached mail and express cars to the end of the train. While they were doing this, they had to disconnect the electricity, so we sat there in the dark with no air conditioning while they fumbled with the cars. We finally got moving for real and left Chicago around 11:30.
Trains east of the Mississippi are not nearly as nice as those that head west. Apparently the old tracks in the East have smaller clearances that can't handle the big double-decker trains. The Lake Shore Limited was not unpleasant, but its single-deck coaches had seats that were significantly closer together than the California Zephyr. It was still a lot nicer than a bus or plane, but (especially given the delay) a real let-down after the train we had come in on.
Shortly after we departed, the "Chief of Onboard Services" came on the P.A. He began with a rather weak apology about the delay. Here we got the real story about the delay. Apparently there was an electrical problem in one of the sleeping cars, which meant that the air conditioning did not work in that car. They had tried to fix the problem, but when they couldn't they had to unhook the bad car and hook up one that worked. You'd think they'd check these things before they had the cars hooked together, and you'd think that they could make the change in less than four hours. You'd also think they could divert the few passengers in that sleeper to coach--inconveniencing just a few people, rather than all the hundreds of passengers on the train. The Chief didn't go in for any of that speculation, though. At least he did offer some apology and explanation, though--however lame it may have been.
Just as we were starting to drift off to sleep, the P.A. came on again with IRA. Ira was the worker in charge of the dining car--sort of like the train equivalent of a maitre d'. I think I would have found his over-enthusiastic announcement annoying under any circumstances, but at 11:30pm after a very long delay, it was more than I could take. He literally shouted into the microphone, in a piercing voice that made us cover our ears. He went on and on and on and on about the virtues of the dinner they would just be starting to serve at midnight. He said someone would be around to take reservations for dinner, and since Margaret and I were now wide awake (thanks to him), we decided we might as well eat. Unfortunately, no one ever did come around to ask us if we wanted dinner, so we had to wait until breakfast to soothe our stomachs.
We headed slowly through Chicago, past the housing projects next to the Dan Ryan Expressway. It was interesting to see scores of teenagers playing basketball in parks alongside the tracks. I wondered if this was in fact the "midnight basketball" program President Clinton had proposed. We turned east and stopped briefly in Hammond, Indiana, before heading past the endless factories of Gary, Portage, and the other old industrial towns on the lakefront in northern Indiana. The last thing I remember seeing was a refinery that was burning off natural gas, with the flame really standing out against the night sky. Shortly after that Margaret closed the curtain beside her. I stared into space for a while, and tossed and turned trying to find a comfortable position. It seemed impossible to get to sleep, but eventually I did get some rest.
CONTINUED IN PART 2
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