Sunday Morning, Empire Builder Observation Car
I finally got up about 8 am (I think) and came out here to the observation car. It’s now 9 am and we are moving into Minneapolis-St Paul. The map shows that we have made up some time and are about 1 hour 8 minutes late right now. And at some point early morning, we had turned from moving across the top of the country, roughly parallel to the Canadian Border to heading south, then south east.
Minnesota reminds me a lot of Missouri. It’s much greener than the areas we’ve been travelling through with a lot more deciduous tree. Basically a whole lot more trees in general! One of the couples we had dinner with was from Minnesota, and said it gets really cold in the winter and really hot in the summer. We commented about the slogan ‘Land of 10,000 lakes’, and she said more like 12,000. She said that everybody has a cabin on some lake or another, and that was how they survived summer. I mentioned that I was interested seeing what Minneapolis looked like because I’ve read the John Sandford ‘Prey’ books for years. They looked blank. They had never heard of John Sandford!
The train staff is amazing. The Café Car attendant has a wonderful rich southern drawl, and sounds like he is announcing late night radio when he is announcing the Café’s schedule and menu. And he always closes his menu announcement with ‘Ice . . . . . .. .Cold . . . . . . . . Beer’, and people on the cars will say it with him. It always takes him longer to say it than I think it will, lol.
I’ve written about the dining car manager, and her announcements always crack me up. Her best quotes are ‘Wait to be seated. Do Not Walk Through My Diner!’, and “We have communal seating. You Will Be seated with people you don’t know. Get to know them!’. All in her crisp drill sergeant voice.
We are now heading along side the Mississippi River. What can I say – it’s big! But honestly, it looks just like the Snohomish River, only wider. The countryside is lovely, and I’m enjoying just watching the scenery.
I had breakfast this morning with more interesting people. One woman had lost her husband of 38 years unexpectedly, and was just travelling around to get her mind off things. She was ready to head home now, and lived close to Chicago. Another couple had grown up in the midwest, moved to Seattle, back to the midwest and was scoping out Portland with a plan to move there. At one point a couple was talking about a young lady who played the string base. I had seen her getting on in Seattle with her huge instrument. The couple had talked to her and she had told them she was going to music school in New York, and should couldn’t fly with her bass, so she had to take the train. As I’ve said, everybody has a story, and because we were on a long distance train, nobody was in a hurry. It was wonderful to talk to so many different people and hear their stories and why they were taking the train.
After lunch Lee and I headed back to our room and read, dozed, chatted and looked out the window. We were in Wisconsin, which is lovely, and more civilization is showing up. This part of the trip has been all I could have hoped for in seeing parts of the country I probably would never see under other circumstances.
We arrived in Chicago at 5:30, only about 35 minutes late. Union Station is huge, and looks to be the main hub for Amtrak. We got a cab to our hotel and have settled for the night. It will be nice to sleep on a bed that isn’t moving!
