On the train from Washington to Chicago

After our traditional "repack everything right before you leave" frenzy in the morning, we shut down the house (water shut off, water heater and furnace turned off, doors locked, etc.) and threw our luggage into our neighbor's car. She drove us to the Vienna Metro station and we took our first "train" of the trip to Union Station in downtown Washington, D.C. Union station is a beautifully restored station from the glory days of railroading. The central hall was a huge room with an arched, vault-like ceiling decorated everywhere with gilt. The main floor of the concourse has been converted to a set of boutique shops, and the basement hosted a food court with a wide variety of cuisines where we had lunch.

We checked our baggage through to Seattle, inadvertently sending my shaver along with it, and waited an hour in the first class or sleeping car passenger lounge. That was a lot plusher than the regular waiting area for everyone else and had comfortable chairs, cable TV, free coffee or soft drinks, and muffins or sweet rolls, making me wonder if I had suddenly joined the hoi polloi, an uneasy thought for a democrat. I quieted my qualms with a sweet roll while we waited for our train to depart, and promptly at 3:20 p.m. we were escorted to the front of the line and shepherded onto the train .

Since I had a couple of minutes before our scheduled departure, I attempted to duck out for a photo of the train from the front, taking our tickets with me so that I could be sure to get back on the trail. Unfortunately the batteries on my camera chose that moment to go dead, so the photo op was a bust. Disappointed, I climbed back into the car and settled in to our little cabin with Monika to await our departure.

As train started pulling out of the station at 3:55 the conductor started checking for tickets in our carriage, and we found to our horror that we couldn't find our tickets. I wondered if they had fallen out of my pockets when I was out on the platform, but the train was already moving so I couldn't go back out and check that. Monika thought I had been holding the tickets when I sat down, so she started tearing our compartment and every piece of our carry-on luggage apart in a frantic search for our tickets.

The conductor kept working her way down the aisle and we were both getting more and more upset as we tried to think of a plausible story to tell the conductor why we didn't have our tickets. It would sound so lame to say, "They were here just a minute ago!" I mean, the train was already moving out of the station and I doubted very much that they would stop and let us off to find the tickets, and I hoped very much that they wouldn't just chuck us off a moving train! So we were headed for Chicago come what may, but I was dreading the discussion with the conductor and the inevitable hassle to somehow prove that we really were paying customers.

As the conductor neared our cabin, I took a turn at searching for the tickets around and under my seat. Although I couldn't see a thing, my fingers touched a piece of paper that had slipped down a ½ inch crack between the side of the chair and the wall, and once I fished the paper out of the crack it turned out to be our missing tickets. What a relief! Our cabin was by now a royal mess, of course, but we could at least hand over our tickets to the conductor who had finally reached our cabin. I expect the conductor wondered why our clothes, books, and toiletries where scattered all over the cabin just minutes after the train had left the station, but fortunately she didn't say anything.

With that crisis behind us, we settled in for the evening's ride into the mountains to the West. After leaving the Washington, D.C. area, the train followed the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal along the Potomac River, and having walked every mile of the canal's towpath in previous years we could easily recognize where we were. It was fun sitting in the diner having a nice, relaxed dinner while we whistled past "all the old familiar places" from some of our Volksmarches.

We stopped at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, where we had also Volksmarched, and it was nice to see the historic site of John Brown's pre Civil War raid again. From Harper's Ferry we wound our way through the mountains toward the slowly setting sun to Cumberland, Maryland, where we even saw the Roy Rogers that we always had lunch at when we walked there. Finally the sun set and we read for a while until the porter came by to convert our two-seat "couchette" into a tiny two-berth cabin, whereupon we retired for the night.

We both had a lot of trouble getting to sleep because of the unpredictable shakes and jerks of the train. I like to sleep on my side, and the train was shifting in such a way as to repeatedly try to throw me either onto my back or my stomach. Well, I could and did brace myself against flopping over, but have you every tried to get to sleep whilst holding yourself locked into a bracing position? That made it really hard to sleep, except for the times when the train pulled over and stopped for a while, which occurred with some regularity. I finally slipped into a fitful doze in the early morning hours, which lasted for a while despite many interruptions for being tossed into new and unexpected sleeping positions by the train. By morning I had been jostled so much that I felt more as if I had been in a night-long pillow fight rather than being refreshed after a good night's sleep. The phrase "rattled about like a pea in a tin can" came to mind, and it did not auger well for the rest of our rail journey across the U.S.