CHICAGO – Greetings from the South Side, home to the largest rail traffic choke point in the United States. I woke up this morning at around 6:30, having fallen asleep in Cincinnati at around 1:00. That was far later than I wanted to be awake, but I got in a groove writing the last blog [...]
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CHICAGO – Now for the main course. For as much as I enjoyed my time in Chicago and am looking forward to visiting the Bay Area, the centerpiece of the trip starts now as I sit in Superliner Roomette 7 of Car 531 on the California Zephyr en route to Emeryville, Calif. I’m on the [...]
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CHICAGO – I’ve done a lot of travelogues before, and I have a bad habit of stating on the record that I intend to do an entry from somewhere. Most of the time I make myself live up to the promise, but every once in a while I forget, or the circumstances make it not [...]
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WATERLOO, Ind. – Good morning… I set the alarm clock on my phone for 6 a.m., and rolled out of bed not too long after that. The sun hadn’t quite risen yet, but we were pulling into Toledo. Which meant I had to make sure the window curtain was totally shut, and it was. We [...]
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PITTSBURGH – I did manage to stay up this far, and as we pull into the Steel City we’re rolling past a neon sign-bedecked Heinz factory. The central marquee is an animated ketchup bottle. It’s pretty cool. Speaking of designed things, I studied a lot of planning and design stuff in college and that part [...]
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CONNELLSVILLE, Pa. – You know you’re really in the countryside when you have no cell phone signal whatsoever. Miles and miles with nothing but the little X next to the power pole in the upper-right hand corner of the screen, even though you’re technically in the same state as the wired metropolis you call home. [...]
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MARTINSBURG, W. Va. – I never really have been much of a country boy. I was born and raised in one big city, then went to college in another and still live there. I prefer carrying an iPod and a subway pass to a fife and a fiddle. But the scenery as we’ve rolled through [...]
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WASHINGTON – Perhaps the best perk of traveling by sleeper car on Amtrak is that you get to use the rail system’s equivalent of frequent-flyer club lounges. I’m not a member of any airline lounge clubs, nor do I travel on Amtrak enough (believe it or not) to qualify for the SelectPlus status that would [...]
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