Touching base
The need to say I'm all right is powerful.
Which is funny, because of the 250 or so people who seem to read my blog, I've met maybe a dozen, and can say I really know, only a handful.
Two of those are here, and so I have no need to tell them, the rest, well that's part of what makes blogs so strange and wonderful. Village life, without the actual villiage. If I want to disappear, all I have to do is stop writing.
But, I'm here, in beautiful Seattle, train trip done with and a week or so to bum about with Maia, visit friends and feel connected, and detached.
The trip was fun. I commend it to people travelling in pairs. Cost, for a one way ticket, was less than airfare, though the time was greater. On the other hand that was cheaper than coach, and travelling first class.
To go back, we had a social function to attend in L.A., and I had a seminar to attend in Long Beach, so we drove down with our roommate. What's normally a 3 1/2 hour trip took me almost five.
We got to the train station, just as the Coast Starlight was pulling in, dead on time. Maia and her mother (who was dropping us off) headed for the back of the train, while I was telling them we needed to go forward. When the conductor found out we were in a sleeper (I want to say Pullman, but Pullman's, and porters are gone the way of the Dodo), she told us we needed to go to the front of the train.
As we made our way, the attendant called out, "Is that Maia and Terry?". It was an auspicious start.
On the train, baggage stowed and rolling North. We had, so the schedule said, 34 hours to go.
The conductor came to punch our tickets and told us we could stow our bags in the lower portion of the car, where the showers were. We did, but left the upper bunk down. The lower overhead was actually cosier. Past the San Fernando Valley, and in to the hills of Chatsworth, into the tunnels and out into Moorpark.
We went to the Parlor car. Jose said hello, I got a bloody Mary (alcohol was the only thing we had to pay for) and we waited for lunch, drank some tea and coffee, nibbled on a danish. In Santa Barbara a couple of college kids, baby faced and sort of brash got on. They bought a bottle of wine, but neither of them had wallets on them, so the one (and all Jose wanted was one ID) went to get it, the other paid.
When he got back, they asked Jose to hold the bottle, as they'd decided not to drink it now, and would he hold it for them. He did.
Lunch was nice. Quiche, salad, coffee, a roll; and company. The tables seat four, and you get whom you get. Spider was a very nice philosophical anarchist. He doesn't seem to realise the only way he can rally ponder the joys of a lack of heirachical gov't (his term) is because he is safely inside of one. By the end of lunch (and while he has about 15 years on me, he was a bit lacking in the realms of political theory. Wilsonian self-determinism was beyond him, and state actions are precisely the same, in his eyes as terrorism) he admitted that Anarchy as a way of life only works if everyone buys into the plan. The irony of that was lost on him.
Rolling through Vandenberg, and into Grover Beach, where the coat Maia forgot was delivered by the friend who is house-sitting (as at least three of the four of us who live there are gone until after Christmas, and the dogs and the rodents need to be fed).
Maia took a nap, I played some games on the computer (I'm slowly conquering Rome, it's taking less time than the real Roman Empire took to build, but it's not fast) and we headed into Los Padres and the early dark of winter, as we sat in the parlor car and took part in the wine tasting (Fess Parker's Pinot Noir is ok, but not great. Probably worth what is costs, but it wants food, and more attention to bringing out the grapes)
At 7:30 we went to supper. The two guys from UCSB joined us. Tony was telling Ryan that Jose wouldn't give him the wine, becuase he'd not seen an ID, and his statement that Ryan had gone and gotten it was met with a polite (because I'd talked with Jose, and he is polite) denial. Having seen the exchange, Jose was in the right. They'd tried a dodge and failed.
He even said, though he didn't seem to realise anyone was listening, that he's said they were lovers and it was their anniversary, but that failed too. I was willing to believe the facts were true, but not that he'd tried it on Jose.
We got to talking (which happens at every meal I've had on a train, and at every table I've seen. I don't know if it the train, or the small tables, or the simple fact that eating together is findamentally social and one can't ignore one's fellows, but it happened, and was always amusing, and never really unpleasant). Tony was antagonistic. He tried to pick a couple of fights with me, but failed. One, I have very few buttons, and his attempts to prove something (greater intelligence than mine, or skill at argument, or knowledge of film, or whatever it was) weren't enough to make me feel threatened.
That he tried to use impressive vocabulary, and used it wrong didn't help. One woman (whom we'd met when she got on, and talked horses with) chimed in that, were we to have a food fight she wanted better seats. We weren't that loud, but it got spirited. At one point he was so inane in his attempt at argument {he was fond of making straw men, I was more fond of burning them) that I told him he was being a fool.. That led to a couple of minutes of him trying to put more words in my mouth, but when the dust settled he was much better behaved.
So to the room, and to bed. By now we were a tad delayed. Amtrak doesn't own the rails, Union Pacific does, and the assert the right of way. By morning we were some four hours behind, and pulling two more cars for UP. So breakfast while we passed Mt. Shasta, morning through the lower cascades; with trees, and snow. Lunch past Klamath Lake (fog beshrouded and duck covered), and then some time talking knitting and crochet in the parlor car. Napping through the wine tasting (Jose was disappointed at our non-appearance) and dinner in the early dark.
More books, talking in the parlor with a guy from Texas, one from Australia, and the trucker who was doing crochet with his wife when we were in earlier (they did long haul together, and were now retired). The conversation ranged from politics (and his evolving views of the problems the Aussies and the Aboriginies are having, and how they are being worked out), to plants, to woods, to the mechanics of driving on forzen water (not icy roads, but accross lakes and the Arctic Ocean, to food, to I forget what all.
Back to the room, Maia taking a nap, I'm reading in the upper bunk, a sort of nap and pulling into King Terminal at midnight. The world stopped moving and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
libertango came to get us and we went home to akirlu and Sara the Wonder Dog.
The cost was a trifle more than we'd have spent if we'd taken a coach seat, and bought the food (which was good. Value for cost. We ate a bit more than we would have, were we paying as we went, but we wanted for nothing). For that extra we were well treated, got to sleep flat, enjoy some privacy and feel we were top of the mark.
It can't be done if one needs to be somewhere at a given time (one of our meal companions was on her way to an interview, her local sleep was being lost, but we talked a lot of army stories. She's been in for ten years, and was, by job description, a General's Secretary, which includes a lot of baby-sitting), but if one has the time, one ought to do it, at least once.
Which is funny, because of the 250 or so people who seem to read my blog, I've met maybe a dozen, and can say I really know, only a handful.
Two of those are here, and so I have no need to tell them, the rest, well that's part of what makes blogs so strange and wonderful. Village life, without the actual villiage. If I want to disappear, all I have to do is stop writing.
But, I'm here, in beautiful Seattle, train trip done with and a week or so to bum about with Maia, visit friends and feel connected, and detached.
The trip was fun. I commend it to people travelling in pairs. Cost, for a one way ticket, was less than airfare, though the time was greater. On the other hand that was cheaper than coach, and travelling first class.
To go back, we had a social function to attend in L.A., and I had a seminar to attend in Long Beach, so we drove down with our roommate. What's normally a 3 1/2 hour trip took me almost five.
We got to the train station, just as the Coast Starlight was pulling in, dead on time. Maia and her mother (who was dropping us off) headed for the back of the train, while I was telling them we needed to go forward. When the conductor found out we were in a sleeper (I want to say Pullman, but Pullman's, and porters are gone the way of the Dodo), she told us we needed to go to the front of the train.
As we made our way, the attendant called out, "Is that Maia and Terry?". It was an auspicious start.
On the train, baggage stowed and rolling North. We had, so the schedule said, 34 hours to go.
The conductor came to punch our tickets and told us we could stow our bags in the lower portion of the car, where the showers were. We did, but left the upper bunk down. The lower overhead was actually cosier. Past the San Fernando Valley, and in to the hills of Chatsworth, into the tunnels and out into Moorpark.
We went to the Parlor car. Jose said hello, I got a bloody Mary (alcohol was the only thing we had to pay for) and we waited for lunch, drank some tea and coffee, nibbled on a danish. In Santa Barbara a couple of college kids, baby faced and sort of brash got on. They bought a bottle of wine, but neither of them had wallets on them, so the one (and all Jose wanted was one ID) went to get it, the other paid.
When he got back, they asked Jose to hold the bottle, as they'd decided not to drink it now, and would he hold it for them. He did.
Lunch was nice. Quiche, salad, coffee, a roll; and company. The tables seat four, and you get whom you get. Spider was a very nice philosophical anarchist. He doesn't seem to realise the only way he can rally ponder the joys of a lack of heirachical gov't (his term) is because he is safely inside of one. By the end of lunch (and while he has about 15 years on me, he was a bit lacking in the realms of political theory. Wilsonian self-determinism was beyond him, and state actions are precisely the same, in his eyes as terrorism) he admitted that Anarchy as a way of life only works if everyone buys into the plan. The irony of that was lost on him.
Rolling through Vandenberg, and into Grover Beach, where the coat Maia forgot was delivered by the friend who is house-sitting (as at least three of the four of us who live there are gone until after Christmas, and the dogs and the rodents need to be fed).
Maia took a nap, I played some games on the computer (I'm slowly conquering Rome, it's taking less time than the real Roman Empire took to build, but it's not fast) and we headed into Los Padres and the early dark of winter, as we sat in the parlor car and took part in the wine tasting (Fess Parker's Pinot Noir is ok, but not great. Probably worth what is costs, but it wants food, and more attention to bringing out the grapes)
At 7:30 we went to supper. The two guys from UCSB joined us. Tony was telling Ryan that Jose wouldn't give him the wine, becuase he'd not seen an ID, and his statement that Ryan had gone and gotten it was met with a polite (because I'd talked with Jose, and he is polite) denial. Having seen the exchange, Jose was in the right. They'd tried a dodge and failed.
He even said, though he didn't seem to realise anyone was listening, that he's said they were lovers and it was their anniversary, but that failed too. I was willing to believe the facts were true, but not that he'd tried it on Jose.
We got to talking (which happens at every meal I've had on a train, and at every table I've seen. I don't know if it the train, or the small tables, or the simple fact that eating together is findamentally social and one can't ignore one's fellows, but it happened, and was always amusing, and never really unpleasant). Tony was antagonistic. He tried to pick a couple of fights with me, but failed. One, I have very few buttons, and his attempts to prove something (greater intelligence than mine, or skill at argument, or knowledge of film, or whatever it was) weren't enough to make me feel threatened.
That he tried to use impressive vocabulary, and used it wrong didn't help. One woman (whom we'd met when she got on, and talked horses with) chimed in that, were we to have a food fight she wanted better seats. We weren't that loud, but it got spirited. At one point he was so inane in his attempt at argument {he was fond of making straw men, I was more fond of burning them) that I told him he was being a fool.. That led to a couple of minutes of him trying to put more words in my mouth, but when the dust settled he was much better behaved.
So to the room, and to bed. By now we were a tad delayed. Amtrak doesn't own the rails, Union Pacific does, and the assert the right of way. By morning we were some four hours behind, and pulling two more cars for UP. So breakfast while we passed Mt. Shasta, morning through the lower cascades; with trees, and snow. Lunch past Klamath Lake (fog beshrouded and duck covered), and then some time talking knitting and crochet in the parlor car. Napping through the wine tasting (Jose was disappointed at our non-appearance) and dinner in the early dark.
More books, talking in the parlor with a guy from Texas, one from Australia, and the trucker who was doing crochet with his wife when we were in earlier (they did long haul together, and were now retired). The conversation ranged from politics (and his evolving views of the problems the Aussies and the Aboriginies are having, and how they are being worked out), to plants, to woods, to the mechanics of driving on forzen water (not icy roads, but accross lakes and the Arctic Ocean, to food, to I forget what all.
Back to the room, Maia taking a nap, I'm reading in the upper bunk, a sort of nap and pulling into King Terminal at midnight. The world stopped moving and
libertango came to get us and we went home to akirlu and Sara the Wonder Dog.The cost was a trifle more than we'd have spent if we'd taken a coach seat, and bought the food (which was good. Value for cost. We ate a bit more than we would have, were we paying as we went, but we wanted for nothing). For that extra we were well treated, got to sleep flat, enjoy some privacy and feel we were top of the mark.
It can't be done if one needs to be somewhere at a given time (one of our meal companions was on her way to an interview, her local sleep was being lost, but we talked a lot of army stories. She's been in for ten years, and was, by job description, a General's Secretary, which includes a lot of baby-sitting), but if one has the time, one ought to do it, at least once.
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You can move around. There's food (even on a corridor train the snack bar is pretty good) it's relaxed.
No bag searches, no one treating you like a villian, just because you want to get from A to B.
And one isn't driving, so sleep, books, conversation, looking at the scenerey are possible.
TK
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...may I post that in
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TK
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But we are pretty much doing that.
If you do, let us know, and we'll meet you at the SLO station stop.
TK
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the beauty of train riding
I miss those care free days. Have fun over there!!!
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I haven't ridden on a train since I was in Europe, 1991. It really is a delightful experience....however, I don't ever seem to have the luxury to spend on a train schedule...although I hope to again some day soon. :)