In and Out of Chicago –
Tuesday, Nov 14
I don’t think I got any sleep sitting in that chair. It wasn’t comfortable; it didn’t recline or rotate. The arm of the chair was so far from the window and wall that if you tried to prop a pillow on the armrest, the pillow would slowly slide down in the gap. Hubby didn’t have much better luck; he thought the rocking of the train was too unpredictable and jolting.
We got up about 5:40 AM and were soon off to the café car for breakfast. We were a little early and had to wait for the server to get there. While we were eating, we were the only ones there. Then Hubby remembered Chicago was in Central time zone, so he set his watch back. Now it said we were eating at 5:20 and had plenty of time before we got to Chicago at 8:45.
Back in our room, we watched daylight progress. I thought I saw frost on yards and cornfields but wasn’t sure. Mostly I saw naked trees, something you don’t see in Florida unless the tree is dead.
Hubby wanted to lay back down, but the bed had been put away. He stacked the boxes between the sofa and the sink, I moved back to the uncomfortable seat with the cpaps, and he lay down on the couch and dozed for another couple of hours. During that, the attendant took those stacked boxes downstairs and put them by the door so they were ready to go.
We arrived at the Chicago station on time. A Red Cap loaded our luggage in a cart and took us and another lady to the lounge. The lounge people notified us what train we were on and what time 2 be ready to board (2:20). We put our luggage into temporary storage and looked to see what they had to eat. Again, it was snacks, and not a lot of variety.
Hubby settled in to work on his novel, and I worked with pen and notebook. About noon, he decided he was too tired to work anymore, so he wandered off. I jumped onto that computer to work on the short I’d just started the day before we started this trip. Finally got the word count over 1K! It’s been slow going, but until that, I didn’t know where I was going with it. Should move much faster, now.
At 2, I started shutting down and packing things up. Hubby and I went to the temporary luggage storage and put away all the things we had gotten out, then started collecting our luggage just as they called over the PA for our group to go.
Another Red Cap took us to the train where our attendant greeted us. He had us leave our boxes on luggage storage shelves downstairs. When we got to our roomette, we found this one was even smaller than our first one! At least we wouldn’t have to sleep in it, because the train was due to arrive in KC at 10 PM.
Still, we hadn’t been sleeping well, and KC was still hours away. At first, Hub pulled out the laptop and tried to write, but the train was swaying and jolting so much it kept messing up his file, so he gave up and put that away. Then he went walk about for a while, and I made our dinner reservation for 5 o’clock, because we’d never really gotten anything for lunch.
Eventually, it was time to go for supper. We differed on what appetizers we got, but we both had steak (very good) and the cheesecake (also very good).
After dinner, Hubby tried to get some sleeping done. We had 3-4 hours before we had to get off. We turned off all the lights in our roomette and closed the curtains to the hallway, to make it as dark as possible. Hubby took a pillow and leaned into the corner of his seat, but he just could not doze off while sitting up.
The train was moving slowly. They announced we were behind a congestion of freight trains and could only move slowly until the tracks ahead cleared up. Sometime later, we began to move faster and they announced that due to the delay, we would get to KC about 10:42. About 9:45, we got too nervous for Hubby to try to sleep. This was not a major stop where everybody would get off, like DC or Chicago. This was a scheduled 42-minute stop that they were trying to cut down to 10 minutes. Finally, we headed to the door on the lower level so we’d ready to get off.
The train stopped, the attendant help us off with our luggage and flagged down a red cap for us. The red cap was picking up the checked luggage, too, and one of the suitcases he picked up was Hubby’s carry-on. We couldn’t claim it yet, but as least we knew it was there. Then the Red Cap got stopped to help an older man who could barely walk. After several minutes of looking, the train attendant decided the older man had lost his black piece of luggage, that it possibly got left in Chicago. I don’t know how they decided to handle that.
Then we were off to the Central Terminal. We helped the Red Caps unload their cart, claimed our piece of checked luggage and asked questions like, “Do you have the number for a taxi service?” and “Where should we wait for the taxi?”
Now having more luggage than hands to carry it, we made our way through the lobby and out the front door to a bench, where I tried to call Ztrip at 10:50. The line was no longer in service. I went back inside, asked the same guy, and he corrected the number he’d given me. Then he scrolled through his contacts and also gave me a number Yellow Cab.
I went outside and call Ztrip again. I got through and made arrangements. They never showed. The night was chilly. I called Yellow Cab about 11:10. The night guard let us into the vestibule to wait because it was cold. Nobody showed up to get us!
About midnight, we tried to open a door to get out and couldn’t. Hubby went inside to try to find somebody to let us out. What he found was a door that would let us out, so we carried everything over there and went back outside. I called Yellow Cab again. A Ztrip van showed up about 12:30 and asked if we were headed for Independence. Yes, but where was Yellow Cab? We decided to take this guy. As he drove us to our hotel, he told us that Ztrip and Yellow Cab were the same company. Who knew?
He drove us to our hotel. I registered, we got everything up to our room, set up our cpaps and fell into bed somewhere around 2.
Thus our trip by train was a mixed bag of adventures, not all of them due to Amtrak. I probably should have looked up taxi services in KC before we left Florida, so that's something to keep in mind.
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