So THAT’S what mountains look like

I begin re-updating this old blog to keep people aware of what is going on in my life this summer, as, well, I’m in the middle of nowhere.

We begin our journey early on the Morning of the twenty-second. The author and his chauffeur headed from Case Western to the Amtrak station at around 2.45 in the morning, neither completely sure where they were going.  Heading down Chester, it was only through my quick yelling we were able to avoid heading down the wrong path on several occasions. Still, we ended up on W 3rd St., ready to turn off onto the Shoreway and get off at the E 9th St. Exit. Which we did. We then promptly had no idea where the Amtrak station was. So, we turned down E 9th, looked around, then turned around, now heading toward the majestic Erie.  It was then that I saw someone pulling onto a previously-unseen turn we had passed while taking the 9th St. exit. So, we returned down the Shoreway back to W 3rd, and once again headed to the 9th St. exit. However, despite traveling slowly, we still missed it, although I thought I saw it. So, we waited at the 9th St. exit for several minutes (the light was taking forever), wrapped back to W 3rd, and slowly crawled down the 9th St exit. The entrance to the Amtrak station is an abrupt turn, hidden by shubbery, blocked off by white paint on the road. In other words, we had no real chance of noticing it the first time. Also, at E9th, there was a sign pointing east for Amtrak, despite the station being to the west. All the same, we arrived, I got my tickets, I checked my baggage, and I stood by the car with the chauffeur enjoying the cool night air and the ethereal presence of Cleveland abandoned for the night.  Several minutes after the train was scheduled to arrive, an announcement came on the loud speaker saying we should expect to wait another twenty minutes for the eastbound train, and the westbound would arrive afterwards. So, my chauffeur departed, and I walked into the station. There was an Amish family sitting across from me in the waiting lounge, and they had a child with them sleeping on the floor with a towel or something over his eyes. It was adorable, so I discretely took a picture of him with my cell phone. And I waited. Soon enough the eastbound train came, then my ride.  Everyone remaining filed out, where we joined the smokers who were enjoying a chance to have a cigarette before they had to return to the train.

I had my ticket checked and walked onto a dimly lit car. Mildly confused at the exact procedure, and holding out hope for finding a completely empty seat, I wandered a bit. At the end of the car, I decided to just pick a seat, so I attempted to pack my luggage into an overhead rack. There wasn’t enough room, so I turned around to try a spot a little closer to the spot where I entered the car. At that point in time, either the conductor or an assistant asked me if I had a seat. I did, except for the fact someone had just come back in from smoking and taken it while I had my back turned. I said no, so he pointed me to another seat…which someone else grabbed before I could get to it. There was an open seat behind that that was still open, so I cut someone off to take it. Then I stowed my larger piece of luggage, grabbed my pillow, and prepared to sleep. The conductor came by and asked me where I was going, I texted mom, then I went to sleep.

At this point, I would like to interrupt my story with an explanation of how Amtrak operates; if you’re familiar or uninterested, feel free to skip this paragraph. It’s useful knowledge that I didn’t find on Amtrak’s website, so it might be worth reading. Above each pair of seats, Amtrak personnel will stick a slip of paper listing your destination. So, if the seats are unoccupied, there will be no slips of paper. One slip means there is one person in it, and two means both window and aisle are taken. So, if you’re ever boarding Amtrak in the middle of the night when half the passengers are smoking, look for slips of paper to see if you can sit there. Then, if you’re getting off in the night, they will see your destination and alert you before you need to get up. It’s actually a pretty neat system.

I was awake maybe ten minutes before I the lull of the train got to me. I woke up several times for brief moments, first taking off my cowboy hat then moving my pillow to my feet while trying to get comfortable. At one point, the woman sitting next to me needed out of the seat, so I stayed up for ten minutes, figuring she would be back soon enough. She wasn’t, so I woke up perhaps half an hour later. When I finally woke up for good, we were about half an hour from Chicago.  I watched Chicago slowly form around me. When we were close enough for toolbooths to appear on the road were running along, the woman next to me, who had two bags of pretzels she had not touched for the entire trip, offered me one. I actually did kind of want some salty food, so I accepted, and ate those on the way in, finally finishing them about the time I got into Union Station. Once we arrived, I grabbed my stuff and stashed my bags in a locker, then headed outside to try and find a Metra station.

Apparently the cowboy hat I was still wearing screamed “tourist,” as two people hassled me for money before I got to the end of the block. Despite being a tourist, I’m from Cleveland, so you need to make up a better story than “I only need another dollar” or “I bought the wrong ticket” to get me to give you money. I saw a map, then walked to the Metra station, but realized that my train, the Lake Shore Limited, was late by so much that there was no way I could make it to Evanston and back in time to catch my next train. My next option was the El, so I wandered toward the Loop. At the first station I got to, I realized that getting to Evanston via the El would require several route changes as it was a weekend, and I still might not be able to make it back in time. Disheartened, I called the friend I was going to visit and broke the news that I would not actually be visiting. Instead, I wandered toward Millennium Park, which I had never actually visited before. It was okay. I don’t really see what the big deal about it is. I then crossed the Frank Gehrey designed bridge to another park, stayed unimpressed, and wandered back the way I came.

On the west side of Michigan Ave, I saw a Comics store and decided to duck in. They had a pretty good selection of comics, plus a $1.00 pack of random Magic cards (the woman working never noticed me, so I never asked what the exact deal was). But, with no room in my carry-ons, I left empty handed. I strolled around a little more, heading in the general direction of Union Station. I found a place to grab lunch that seemed nice but not too expensive.  I had a burger and a beer, and left feeling satisfied. With nothing better to do, I headed back to the station, grabbed my luggage, and headed into the waiting room. I waited, had a brief conversation with my dad on the phone, and waited some more. I finally boarded, and ended up on the top deck of the farthest back car, sitting in the window seat next to a guy heading to Kansas City. We talked a little, but not too much. He has a daughter and a wife. Used to work for Peterbilt. He’s from Texas (near Odessa), but has also lived in Michigan. Also, he was missing at least one tooth, for what it’s worth.

We ended up stopping before we even hit Naperville for about half an hour. It was frustrating. I did get to watch a bit of high school softball. At one point in time, the left fielder started creeping toward the foul line and the fence. I thought to myself “she’s guessing it’s going to go deep and wide. I wonder how she knows that. Watch, it’s going to go near and in.” It did. The outfielder dove for it, and the ball barely missed her glove. Final score: Thomas 1, batting team 3, outfielder 0. It’s a score I can live with. Soon enough, we started moving again, and I did my favorite thing to do in Illinois: slept.

I woke up to find my seatmate missing. He said he went to the lounge to have a phone call without waking me up, which was nice of him. I asked him if he saw the observation car; he didn’t know. I decided it was time to go exploring, so I headed toward the front of the train, finally ending in the lounge/observation car. It was awesome. There are windows along the walls, plus curved windows heading onto the roof. In other words, you can get a really good view of things from inside. I headed back to my seat, grabbed the journal articles I was going to read, and returned to the observation deck to read them. Eventually, it was time for dinner. I had placed a reservation for 7pm, figuring my late lunch would tide me over. It did.

I was the first person there for the 7 o’clock dinner, so I sat down, waiting for my fellow diners to join me. The first was an International Finance grad student attending school in Phoenix, and she was heading there via Flagstafff. She seemed to know what she was doing, and she was nice, but there was also something about her. Condescension, perhaps? Business? A misinterpretation on my part? I don’t know. I just felt like she would rather be somewhere else. A few minutes later a woman and her four year-old son sat across from me. They got on at Naperville and wondered how the train got to be so late. They were also on their way Kansas City to visit a graduating nephew. Conversation was light and pleasant. The first woman went to Northwestern for grad school, while the mother was originally from Ohio. She currently works in refugee resettlement. I was working on my chicken when the waiter came by to take desert orders; I postponed, both women got cheesecake, and the child got his only food, a brownie. We then crossed over the Mississippi River, letting me cross off a life goal, specifically to cross the Mississippi River at sunset eating on a dining car. Just on the far side, in Iowa, we had to wait for a freight train to pass by. At this point in time, the mother and child had to go to the bathroom and the International Finance student excused herself.

I finally ordered my dessert, a bowl of ice cream. Also, the International Finance student only ate the crust on her cheesecake, leaving behind the cheesecake itself, so I snuck that over to myself and ate the parts she hadn’t already forked (No sense in perfectly good cheese cake going to waste). Then the mother and I talked for a while. She told me about her job, and I told her about a friend of mine interested in that sort of thing. We continued talking for a while, and it was a rather interesting conversation all told. We also saw some wind power plant blades sitting out (around a hundred or so), and neither of us had fully realized how big they actually were. However, at around 8.45, they kicked us out of the dining  room, and I headed back into the observation car to finish my reading.

When I was done, I sat watching the dark country side going by, but soon decided to get some sleep. I headed back to my seat, pulled out the leg rests (like on an E-Z-Boy), reclined the seat, and grabbed my pillow. I woke up around Kansas City, where I was going to say goodbye to my seatmate, but he disappeared before I had the chance to do so. This was a fresh air break station, so I walked outside, stretched, and looked at the skyline. Kansas City is slightly bigger than I thought it was. After the conductor yelled “All Aboard,” I headed inside, reclined both seats, grabbed my pillow, and went to bed.

The night was relatively smooth. I had found out the previous night that I could pull my hood over my eyes and block out most of the light, so I only woke up when my position was too uncomfortable. That wasn’t too often, so I ended up getting a mostly relaxing night’s sleep, definitely better than if I had taken an airplane.

In the morning, I first realized that we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Actually, it seemed I had barely missed Kansas, and had woken up early into Colorado. Which was disappointingly less mountainous than I had hoped. I guess I had always figured that Colorado began with the Rockies. Misconception Eliminated! I started reading the Aeneid, first on my list of summer reading books. We got out at La Junta, where I battled with their urging of us to stay on Amtrak property with my desire to set foot in Colorado outside an Amtrak station (you see, I define visiting a state as having set foot in the state, and not in an airport or railway station. So, while I walked around on the ground outside the train, I wanted to cover my bases). So I sprinted across the street and into a park. And with that, Colorado was added to my list of visited states. (It should be noted I have a two-tiered visited state list, the first being simply being in it, and the second requiring spending the night in the state, and not on a moving object (car, train, airplane, etc.). The second is the tougher one, and eliminates several states for me (Alabama, Tennessee, and Indiana, for instance, all of which I have been in multiple times). Suffice to say, Colorado is only a Tier-I state).

After La Junta, I was going to go back to the observation room to read, but the National Parks Service had two women come in to talk about the area. And, while it may seem mean, it made me leave the observation car. The microphone kept on popping loudly, and the first woman was bad at talking about the area. It was obvious she was reading from a script, and it was also obvious she hadn’t read any of it before hand, as her annunciation rarely matched what was called for by the sentence. I headed to the first floor, into the lounge, where I got a pizza and a Gatorade. I sat there and had a brunch, which wasn’t that bad, while we loitered around Colorado. When I was done, I headed back to my seat and read some more Aeneid. Later I grabbed some donut holes from the lounge. We stopped in Raton, New Mexico, where I wandered around a little, but didn’t do anything as crazy as my La Junta run.

To be perfectly honest, with the lounge car being boring, the trip was humdrum. I saw some awesome views, and took a bunch of pictures (I will figure out the best way to attach pictures to this post, but I have yet to do so still). The train, at one point in time, made several S-turns, so I had a chance to see all but the last two or three cars, and I took pictures of the entire ordeal. I also read the first five books of the Aeneid. And gazed on the window a bit. Train travel is fun, especially if it’s to a place you’ve never been to before. Before long, it was 3.42 pm Mountain Time, and the train, despite being over an hour late to Kansas City, rolled into Albuquerque slightly early for a long break to change crews and have some maintenance performed. I headed into the Greyhound/Amtrak station, where they said to go to pick up baggage. Ten minutes later, I still was baggageless, but I saw a man holding a “Socorro / NMT / NRAO ” sign, so I caught his attention. He saw some bags outside, and sure enough, that’s where they were hiding. I grabbed my stuff, loaded them into the car, and headed south to Socorro.

Another student, who had flown in, was already in the car, but the two of us were tired, and, after crossing the Rio Grande, we both fell asleep. I woke up several miles from Socorro, and noted how we got to the NMT campus. We went to the building I will be working at, called in, and got our reservation packs with keys to get into the NRAO guest house. Then we rode over there. We weren’t really sure where to go, but it ended up being fairly easy to figure out. The two of us went into our own rooms. I left my door open while I did some small unpacking. About fifteen minutes later, she walked over and asked if I wanted to grab dinner. I did, but it had been about 55 hours since my last shower, so I asked for fifteen minutes to smell better and to change.  Ishowered, put on deodorant, grabbed a Cleveland Cavaliers shirt, and we headed toward food.

She had grabbed the map from our reservation packets, so we knew were food was, and I’m pretty damn good with directions, so I got us there. On the way we talked and got to know each other. We ended up walking for a little bit, and we sat down at Sophia’s, a mildly-sketch restaurant that serves Mexican and American food. I got Combo #1, she got nachos, and I got a beer. We talked some more, settled our check, and decided to wander down the main street in Socorro to see what else there is. Not much, as it turns out. We then headed back to where are staying, but we did so by me picking a random road to go down. It ended up being an interesting walk, especially with the sun setting over Socorro Peak. We got back to NMT campus, then strolled around a little bit looking at things, before we decided to call it a night. So, I came back, uploaded pictures, and typed this up. I’m going to read over some journal articles, then get some sleep for tomorrow.

Other things that I forgot to mention:

There was a dog in Socorro attacking a sprinkler for water. It was cute and amusing.

We had to stop in Illinois (the second train) for mechanical problems.

Socorro has a Taco Bell, Burger King, and Sonic. I’m set.

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