Adventures In Traveling – Part I

As vacations go, this one had been more than four years in the planning. And it has been jinxed from the start.

It started out as a California junket, a circuit of the national parks and scenic highways and byways.

Everything was booked: plane tickets, hotels, car rental. Stops in Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, Monterey and Carmel, a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, Death Valley, Vegas …

And then came Covid.

Everything was canceled. Yes, we got our money back, but not the hours of planning and missed opportunities.

So, we rescheduled for last spring. We started to book stuff, despite the ominous signs. Flooding in Monterey. Record snowfall near Yosemite. Conflicts with the timing. You get the picture. 

In the end, we canceled it again.

So, we are nothing if not adaptable, so we altered our plans and tweaked this and changed that, and our spring trip morphed into a fall …

Train trip!

So the plan was to fly to Chicago and hop on Amtrak’s California Zephyr and take a modified version of our long-planned trip, skipping some of the national parks and ending up in Las Vegas at a Santana concert, which turned out to be the first tickets we booked.

Everything in order, all excited, we eagerly anticipated the third version of this trip. Again, we ignored the storm clouds brewing: We find out that the Pacific Coast Highway was closed halfway down our planned route, necessitating a rerouting. Oh, and most of Death Valley was closed. Why? Because of flooding. In the desert. From a hurricane.

Then, F’s knees suddenly were missing their meniscus (menisci?), and despite the doctors’ efforts, treatments, and promises, they were not getting any better and the pain was not being alleviated. (Only after our return did an MRI show there was also a bone fracture in one knee.) Then I came down with some dread respiratory disease the day before we left that necessitated a lengthy urgent care visit that resulted in negative strep and Covid tests and a bottle of antibiotics in case it was a sinus infection.

But off we went anyway.

Blowing Into The Windy City

Chicago is a great city, with seemingly as many skyscrapers as New York, including what used to be the world’s tallest, the Sears Tower – now called the Willis Tower, although Chicagoans still call it by its former name. Against my better judgment, while up on its Skydeck, we stepped out on the Ledge – a clear but thankfully enclosed ledge jutting out of the side of the building – looking below our feet 103 stories down to the street.

Chicago has a lake and a river, which means you can ride around the city in a boat, and we also rode around in a bus because I wasn’t going to drive in that traffic. 

How bad was the traffic? Our taxi driver couldn’t deliver us to our hotel from the airport after we flew in. Some sort of parade and/or a protest were about to happen as several downtown streets were blocked off – with massive snowplows, no less, even though it was 60 degrees because I guess in Chicago when they block off a street they really, really don’t want you driving down it anyway. He finally dropped us off more or less underneath our hotel along a subterranean street with a couple of layers of streets above. So there we are, starting our vacation off schlepping suitcases along under the city until we came across the parking garage for our hotel, where fortunately we found an elevator to take us to the lobby.

Anyway, after a nice couple of days in the city which included a great dinner with friends, we were ready for a less urban experience and headed for the train station.

All Aboard!

The train was … interesting. Two days and two nights meant we splurged and booked a private room, complete with beds, a chair and sofa (that was one of the beds), a big window, and a private bathroom. It turns out the beds were bunk beds, with the upper berth complete with a safety harness to keep you from bouncing out during the night as we rumbled down some mighty bumpy train tracks at high speed through the vast prairies of that part of America that geographers call the middle of nowhere.

When Amtrak talks excitedly about a grand adventure traveling by train, they leave out the adventure of clambering down a bunk bed ladder in the dark in the middle of the night because you have to pee, your legs getting entangled with the safety harness, as the train sways from side to side and bounces up and down, as you stumble over to our private bathroom. 

People who have campers probably know what I mean by bathroom. It’s the size of a broom closet, although a broom would feel claustrophobic if you threw a mop in there with it. It’s a toilet with a handheld shower head. If you try to do your business standing up, as boys are wont to do, then you risk being slammed into the walls of the stall – if you weren’t already packed so tightly in there you couldn’t really move your body much at all.

The shower promised hot water, but you also had to push a button to get a quick 10 seconds of water before it stopped. Sitting/stooping/standing in a tiny compartment with, fortunately, only 10 seconds of cold water at a time makes for a quick wake-up call. I never did get any of the promised hot water.

After that, I decided I wasn’t going to try my luck at shaving in the tiny sink what with not knowing when the train would lurch or brake or some other movement that would challenge even a safety blade not to draw blood.

But the compartment did provide privacy, and Amtrak did provide decent meals, and the views from the observation car as we wound our way up and over the Rockies were spectacular. We also had an excellent room attendant who went above and beyond the call of duty to keep us supplied with water, ice, tissues for my ever-present sneezing and nose-blowing, etc. and transform our room into a bedroom and vice versa.

We also met some interesting people at meals in the dining car where you shared tables: a young woman from Vienna, Austria; a young couple from Ohio who not only lived in the town I was born in but he had been born in the same hospital as I had; and the first people I think I’ve every met from Nebraska, who were very friendly even though they were worried because the security alarm in their home had gone off back in North Platte and I just assumed that Nebraska was like my neighborhood and didn’t need home alarms.

Perhaps I should rethink my home security needs.

So there was a lot of fun on the train, but in all honesty we were ready to get off when we finally made it to our destination in California. We were a bit off kilter what with trying to regain our land legs and adjust to the time zone changes, and we also thought it curious that Amtrak thought it would be nice to deposit us in … Oakland.

The station is technically in Emeryville, California, but it suspiciously looks like it is surrounded by Oakland except for where it backs up to San Francisco Bay, so in my mind we were in Oakland no matter what the Emeryville Chamber of Commerce and Amtrak wanted me to believe. Not a city on my bucket list, but it was just fine for a one-night stopover.

And I would be remiss not to point out that the best meal we had on our entire trip – scallops for me and a pork chop for F after some Dungeness crab deviled eggs – was in a Latin American restaurant across the street from our hotel in downtown Oakland. I promised the owner or manager that I would mention it on social media, so here’s a shout-out to Bocanova. 

The next morning we picked up our rental car – and it is a doozy – and headed to the Pacific coast. Stay tuned!