Strom Travel Diaries

Day 1 – Friday, December 17, 2021

Our day only really began when the Lyft driver picked us up a few minutes after 3:30 in the morning. Not that we weren’t already awake and making sure we had everything. In fact, neither of us had actually gone to bed on Thursday night. I had finished what I wanted to get done, so I went ahead and showered, got dressed in my travelin’ duds, and napped on the couch for a couple of hours. Mom did the same minus the nap. She just kept finding things to do, like sweeping the living room where I was napping.

The part that concerned me most about pretty much the whole trip was that it wouldn’t get started on the right foot if we couldn’t get a ride to the train station. We don’t live in Uptown, though it’s not like we’re out in the boonies. But 3:30 a.m. is an awkward time to get transportation and we’re in enough of a suburban area that I wouldn’t necessarily expect Lyft or Uber drivers to be there as a matter of course. A couple of days earlier in the week, I set an alarm to wake me up around then to check the map on Lyft just to see if any drivers were around. There were, but of course when I check the map at 2:30 a.m. on Friday—nobody. Turns out, this fretting over a Lyft driver was not what should have worried me. By the time 3:20 had rolled around, there were a few drivers around and our ride got accepted quickly. However, I had checked the status of our train, #20, the Crescent, a few minutes before and found that it was running 2 hours late. Mom and I decided that we’d rather wait at the station and be ready when the train did get in.

We got to the station a little after 4—Mom made friends with the Lyft driver, who had lived in an apartment in our area about 40 years previously—and grabbed a bench. Mom went to check the bag, which she was advised to do to Washington D.C. rather than Chicago. When she originally booked the trip it was a round-trip, multi-city package out of D.C. But several days later, she called Amtrak and asked if we could just start and end in Charlotte—sure, they said, no big deal. But it meant that we had a separate ticket from Charlotte to D.C., with a 3-ish hour layover, and the Amtrak guy on Friday morning said that it would be better to get our bag in D.C. and recheck the bag to Chicago to make sure it wouldn’t get delayed. Slight spoiler alert, but we were very glad we had done this.

And so the waiting commenced. The 5:30 a.m. departure had already been pushed back to 7:30, then to 8, then to 8:15. And practically this whole time a woman sitting on the bench behind us was talking to someone on the phone and just airing everyone’s business and net worth for all to hear. Mom and I exchanged multiple looks of disbelief that a) this woman would be talking about such personal things in such a public place and b) that she could still be talking after 2 ½ hours! This proved to be the main distraction when we weren’t napping, reading, or checking the train status for the umpteenth time until a different passenger changing trains in D.C. to get to Chicago was called to the desk. Mom decided that she should probably investigate as well. It turned out that the train was now so delayed that it was nearly certain we would miss our connection in D.C. and the young woman at the ticket counter gave us a couple of options: either continue on and hope that the train would make it and we would have time to recheck our bag or change trains in Charlottesville and get on a different connection to Chicago. Of course, the train out of Charlottesville didn’t have any sleeper rooms available and either way it was going to be an overnight trip. Mom and I discussed a bit and decided to try our luck with the original plan, though the ticket lady said that Amtrak wouldn’t put us up for the night if we missed the connection since we were given an alternate. However, if we did in fact miss our connection, we could be put on the same train out of D.C. the next day since there was an accessible bedroom still available.

Well, dear reader, any guesses as to what happened?

Of course we missed our connection! The train didn’t even get to Charlotte until nearly 9 and didn’t get underway to D.C. until about 9:15. Our car attendant, Jose, was very nice and got our breakfast order in very quickly. French toast for both of us, if anyone’s curious. I napped off and on until Jose brought lunch about 12:30, then got down the top bunk so I could stretch out. We were in a Viewliner roomette, so the two facing seats could be brought together to form one twin-size bed, and there was a bunk above that could be lowered for the second bed. We also had a small toilet and sink, which was handy. When I got up to the bunk I saw that a copy of Viking Publisher’s Portable Nietzsche had been left in the little pocket for personal items. A previous occupant? Amtrak’s alternative to a Gideon Bible? Who knows?

We finally pulled into D.C. around 5:15 p.m. and the train to Chicago had left over an hour before. We finally found the customer service desk and they were much more accommodating than we had been led to believe they would. The guy at the desk immediately took us to the snazzy first-class lounge (turns out that you get to hang out there anyway when you have a sleeper ticket) while he fixed us up with a room for the night and changed our reservation for the Chicago-bound train. It took about an hour, but we got all fixed up. The woman at the desk in the lounge, Alexis, even helped us get in touch with the customer service for our Amtrak vacation package to have them get in touch with our Chicago hotel to let them know we’d be checking in a day late. She also made the wonderful suggestion to go check in at our hotel and then walk around the Capitol and National Mall to see the National Christmas tree and other lights. So we did.

Amtrak arranged for us to stay at the Phoenix Park Hotel, a cute little hotel just about a block from Union Station, and practically within spittin’ distance of the Capitol. We took our stuff to our room, watched “Wheel” and “Jeop” while having some snacks, and then set out for our walk. We had thought that this trip would be a pretty sedentary one, what with all of the time on trains and tour buses. Well, if our walk on Friday night is anything to go by, we will do plenty of walking. The Capitol was just 2 or 3 blocks from the hotel (don’t ask me in which direction—I have no earthly idea, but we passed the Hall of the States on the way) and we walked up towards the Senate side. In order to make the most of things, we walked around the Capitol to the front (back?) where the big drive is, not the side facing the National Mall. We walked around admiring the fancy streetlights and were able to peer down a skylight in the lawn to a staircase. So neat.

We walked around to the back of the Capitol and saw the National Christmas Tree, then walked for a few minutes in the botanical garden. We decided to walk down the Mall to the Washington Monument and then see if we felt like going any further. We passed a Smithsonian museum for every day of the month it seemed. There were other people around, but not a crowd by any means. There were more people around the Washington Monument, and we went to the Reflecting Pool and around the WWII Memorial, before deciding to go over to the White House and see what was happening over there.

The White House had three lit wreaths hanging between the main columns and lit trees in front (back?) and we got close enough to see some of them. At that point we’d walked a “fur piece” and it was getting close to 10 p.m. so we decided to head back to the hotel, up the other side of the Mall. As we hadn’t expected to be walking nearly that much (and had left our big suitcase at the station in anticipation of rechecking it before leaving Saturday), Mom had on her rainboots instead of a better walking shoe. Her pinky toe ended up a bit raw from her sock seam rubbing it. By the time we got back to the hotel we were both about ready to collapse.