Time

WILMINGTON, Del. – Time is both relative and absolute.
When my flight from Los Angeles landed in suburban Baltimore at 7:00 this morning, it was 4:00 a.m. in Klamath Falls, Oregon.
It was also 5:00 a.m. in Whitefish, Montana; 6:00 a.m. at Wrigley Field in Chicago; and 12:00 p.m. at the Headingley Carnegie Cricket Ground in [...]

Sound and happiness, signifying a lot

TACOMA, Wash. – I didn’t blog yesterday for two reasons. First, I spent most of the day fixing incorrect timestamps on the photos I took in Chicago, because I forgot to reset the time zone. It may seem trivial, but you’ll notice that the photoset of the trip is presented in chronological order. Since I’m [...]

Blame Canada

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. [...]

Brick, ivy, oak and sand

When I headed out this morning, I figured that my first destination would be the highlight of the day: a guided tour of Wrigley Field.
As has happened to millions of other baseball fans over the years, I fell in love with the place when I visited it for the first time last season. The tour [...]

Geese in the city

CHICAGO – Yesterday was pretty crazy, but a lot of fun.
After arriving in Chicago, I went off in search of a three-day subway pass. You would think this would be easy to find in the city’s biggest train station, but there was no indication that passes were sold there.
So I walked a few blocks north [...]

Day 2

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 post [...]

Here we go again

I’m back.
Exactly nine hours from now, I’ll be on an Amtrak train headed for Chicago. For the second year in a row, I’m traveling across the country by rail, and this time I’m head to Seattle and Los Angeles after spending a few days in the Windy City.
While I know where I’m headed, I’m not [...]

2-1

Gary Larson

DULLES, Va. – I was planning to write the last post on this blog before I left Oakland last night. I composed the whole thing and was about 30 seconds away from posting it when the flight crew said they had shut the door and all electronic devices needed to be turned off.
I set my [...]

Finally

SAN MATEO, Calif. – It took a mighty long time, but I’ve finally made it to the Bay Area.
I last blogged when the train left Colfax. Soon after that, we  were given permission by Union Pacific to divert onto a different track and pass the freight train that had been delaying us so much.
We ended [...]