The whistle blew twice. Exactly on time, at 4:55 p.m., Amtrak's Empire Builder moved slowly out of King Street station, plunged immediately into the tunnel beneath the streets of downtown Seattle, and emerged minutes later into early twilight along the shore of Elliot Bay. I settled back in my roomette, smiling contentedly. In forty-six hours I'd arrive in Chicago.
Hey, knock it off. You're just giving the readers a quick summary of last week's trip. You're not writing a lousy novel!
OK, OK. I'll summarize. It was dark by the time we reached Everett where the train turned right, heading east. I had dinner (Atlantic Salmon) in the diner at 7:15 p.m., and was sound asleep in my bed long before we reached Spokane. The section of the train arriving from Portland was hooked onto our train in Spokane, but -- as in my last trip on the Empire Builder in 2009 -- I slept soundly through the process.
I awoke at a predawn stop and several inches of snow in Whitefish, Montana. I pulled on some clothes and enjoyed a few minutes outside the train in the crisp mountain air before proceeding to the diner for a French toast breakfast. Altogether, Amtrak served me two breakfasts, two lunches, and two dinners -- all included in the ticket price. The train proved unusually uncrowded --- maybe only half the roomettes and bedrooms were occupied.
We crossed the Rockies just south of Glacier National Park, and then glided across the vast, flat, snowy expanse of eastern Montana and North Dakota. The second morning, we pulled into St. Paul, Minnesota, by which time we were beyond the snows of the prairies, and headed southward uneventfully to Union Station in Chicago, arriving fifteen minutes early at 4:30 p.m.
The final trip of my three-year Chicago-by-Amtrak trifecta had been completed -- California Zephyr in 2022, Southwest Chief in 2023, and now the Empire Builder.
I have a strange attraction for long distance railway travel, obviously -- at least when I can do it in sleeper accommodations -- but I was excited to arrive in Chicago. My friends Jim and Dorothy had taken a Greyhound up from West Lafayette, Indiana, and had arrived at their (and my) hotel on Wacker Drive about two hours before my arrival. Rather than hunt around for the station's inconvenient Uber stop, I decided to take an available cab to the hotel. Bad Decision. The cab was unmetered, and the fare for a ten-minute ride was a shocking $56. (It would have been $12 by Uber.) Be warned.
We had arrived Tuesday evening. On Wednesday, we took an interurban Metra train from Union Station to suburban Aurora. Aurora may be a suburb of Chicago, but it is also the second largest city in Illinois, and is full of theaters and other activities devoted to the arts.
We attended an excellent performance of the Billy Elliot musical -- unexpectedly good dancing by the thirteen-year-old star, good singing and acting by all, and very good production values in general.
On Thursday, we visited the Chicago Museum of American Writing. It's a little difficult to imagine how you could make a museum of writing, but it was done well, and I walked away feeling like I'd had a quick refresher course in American Literature.
Dorothy then went off exploring on her own, and Jim and I took a rail transit -- after some absurd walking around in circles attempting to find the station -- to the south shore and the Museum of Science and Industry. After caffeinating ourselves in the museum cafeteria, we spent all our museum time exploring the exhibit of the German U-505, captured by the U.S. Navy during World War II. The first capture of an enemy ship in battle since 1813.
It wasn't easy to capture a German sub. It would have been far easier to simply blow it out of the water. But extensive planning had gone into the capture of this submarine, forcing the crew to abandon the ship before they had time to successfully set the explosive charges that would have scuttled it. The capture gave us valuable information about German technology -- not only the ship itself but a large number of documents and cryptology information, including an Enigma decoder.
I enjoyed most the museum's documentary exhibits in the corridors leading to the ship itself -- which seemed huge from the outside -- but we also toured the interior of the sub itself, giving me a gut appreciation of what it would have been like to find myself cooped up with a large number of fellow crew in what was actually a very small tube, while depth charges were going off all around us. Not fun.
We all got back together for dinner, and then walked to a nearby theater where we saw a stage production of Highway Patrol -- a three person cast in a play about the heartbreak of fake identities on the internet.
Then, the next morning, we bid each other farewell -- Jim and Dorothy returning to Union Station for their Greyhound ride south, and I taking the CTA to O'Hare airport for my Alaska Airline flight to Seattle.
A lot of fun, and enjoyable adventures with two enjoyable friends. I'm ready for more travel. But then -- when am I not?
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Photo -- Train stop at Whitefish, Montana.
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