(no subject)
I'm camped out in in Chicago's Union Station right now, and very excited to have net access after spending the last several days on a train. It's still a couple of hours till my next train departs, and I am savoring some Jamba Juice - positively decadent and deliciously fresh, compared to the food I brought along and the food available on board. Next to my cozy table there is a "Kelly's Cajun Grill" - the employees keep yelling "yummy yummy right here!" in thick Asian accents at everyone who walks by. (Can you imagine anything more festively Cajun than that? Yeah, me either.)
Highlights of the first and longest leg of the trip included passing through the Moffat Tunnel, which is at an elevation of 27,000 feet and cost tens of millions of dollars to build at a time where that was even more money than it is now. (It cut 27 very difficult railway miles down to six miles going through a nice, level, very dark tunnel). When we passed through the tunnel, it took us 15 minutes to re-emerge into sunlight again. We were forbidden from leaving our seats during the crossing, because the air quality within the tunnel is so poor. The conductors told us that if we went from car to car and were exposed to that air, we'd lose consciousness. (I never would've thought there were transit tunnels like that in the world - it seems so outer space-like!)
Last night, I spent lots of time curled up in a seat under a blanket with a beautiful little punk girl named Natalie (she looks a bit like a pre-drinking-age Claire Danes with a mostly shaved head) who was traveling from Martinez, CA back to Kentucky to take care of her pregnant sister. She swaggered up and helped me open my beer bottle, told me my hair was bad-ass, and we ended up talking (and eventually squeezing under a blanket together) all night. :) Lots of drunk guys on the train were trying to hit on her, with no success, so I got a funny combination of jealous glares and "oooh, she likes girls!" sorts of looks. *rolls eyes* I never noticed train trips being quite so cruisy before.
Oh, and there was a very Indiana Jones-esque "no ticket" scenario where some guy got on in the wee hours of the morning in Nebraska and claimed he'd bought his ticket sometime last year. The ticket turned out to be a weak attempt at a fake. Unlike the movie, they didn't push him out of a zeppelin, but he did have to get off at the next stop, which was somewhere equally uninteresting, by which I mean "still in Nebraska".
The train pulled into Chicago ahead of schedule today. I'm having an absolutely wonderful time - I've not done any real travel in so long that I'd almost forgotten how much I love it. Next stop, Washington DC, tomorrow afternoon if all the stars continue to align. *crossing fingers and signing off*