ST. CLOUD, Minn. – When I was debating whether to blog this trip, I had a hunch that a time would come when I just wouldn’t want to write.
I think this night was the first such time.
I feel that mainly because I don’t want to bore you with too many words that are just travelogue. It doesn’t add anything new to the conversation, and I say that knowing that the reason why I started this blog in the first place was to chronicle a trip.
And after all, I’ve been sitting on a train looking out the window for the last 10 hours. There’s only so many ways you can describe looking out a window, even if I did some interesting stuff before leaving Chicago.
My main goal for the morning was to get down to the U.S. Soccer Federation’s headquarters building, which located across the Metra tracks from Soldier Field at 18th Street and Prairie Avenue. Despite a steady rain that made walking around a bit annoying, I got there and took a few pictures.
No, it’s not much of a building. Were the sign not there, you might think it was a residential property like everything else in the neighborhood. But I had seen a few pictures of the building before, so I wasn’t all that surprised.
I got to Union Station at around 1:30 and boarded the train. After we left, I went to the lounge car for a few hours to listen to the National Park Service’s “Rails to Trails” narration of the route between Chicago and Winona, Minnesota.
I didn’t stay the whole time, but it was definitely enjoyable. I learned a lot about the towns we passed through and their wide variety of parks, factories and other landmarks.
After dinner, we hit our first major delay of the trip. We were about to enter a stretch of single track, and a few miles ahead of us a Canadian National freight train had stopped after tripping a “hot box” detector. The term is used when a wheel bearing overheats.
We were told that the delay would be about 20 minutes, but it ended up being over an hour. By the train finally passed us by, the sun had long since set and I could barely see the boxcars out the window.
We arrived in Winona two hours behind schedule. We were supposed to have a decently long layover there, but it only ended up lasting around 10 minutes.
Between there and St. Paul, we made up 15 minutes of time. We arrived in the Twin Cities at 12:13 a.m., and stayed for half an hour or so instead of the listed 45 minutes.
As we arrived in St. Paul, I queued up the only thing I had on my iPod that was worth listening to in this part of the country: A Prairie Home Companion’s News from Lake Wobegon.
Granting that Lake Wobegon doesn’t actually exist, we aren’t too far from the eponymous store in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington. We also passed within reasonable distance of the Lake Wobegon Coffee Shop & Diner in Holdingford after leaving the Twin Cities.
I was able to get a few pictures of the platform at St. Paul, including one of some consequence. Those of you who follow college basketball might recall that this past March, Minnesota became Bally Territory during the NCAA Tournament.
Of course I had to document Bally’s first trip back here since then.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | a prairie home companion, american public media, amtrak, bally, bloomington, canadian national, chicago, college basketball, empire builder, freight trains, garrison keillor, holdingford, illinois, lake wobegon, march madness, metra, minneapolis, minnesota, national park service, ncaa tournament, public radio, rails to trails, soldier field, st. cloud, st. paul, trains, twin cities, u.s. soccer, union station, usmnt, uswnt, winona
