Strom Travel Diaries

Day 5 – Tuesday, December 21, 2021

We got up at about 7 a.m. and took turns getting dressed and visiting the bathroom. We got to breakfast a little before 8 and watched the landscape getting lighter and lighter. Mom commented on the kind of column of light that the sun made as it was rising. I didn’t realize it until later in the day, but we were greeting the shortest day of the year and the first day of winter on a train in North Dakota! We were still finishing up our breakfast when we started hearing announcements about the conductor being sorry for the delay and we’d be up and running again shortly, etc. We had been stopped for a bit and it turned out that one of the cars had brakes on that wouldn’t release and it was keeping the train from continuing on to the next stop: Minot, ND.

They finally got the issue with the brakes fixed (I guess brakes that are working too well are better than brakes that aren’t working well enough?) and we pulled into Minot a bit late. Despite the conductor saying that due to the previous delay, we’d only be in Minot for 15-20 minutes—long enough for a quick breath of fresh air or a smoke break—we were there for over an hour. We eventually rolled out of Minot (a chilly 7°) around 11:30. Shortly thereafter, the dining car waitress came on the intercom to say that lunch would be served at 11:30-1 mountain time, which didn’t apply to our phones/watches/other timekeeping devices at that moment. When Mom and I did end up down in the dining car, we were told it was a bit full but they’d page us in a couple of minutes when a table was ready. We went back to our room (Cody had put the bunks up while we were at breakfast) and waited. Nothing. After a good 30 minutes of waiting, we went back to the dining car, only to be told they’d tried paging us multiple times! Fortunately, there were tables free at that point and we could get on with lunch (Caesar salads for both of us, but I had chicken on mine).

Once we were done with our afternoon repast, we took ourselves down to the lounge car to better see the scenery on both sides of the car. While all of the trains we’d been on to this point had passed through some pretty industrial areas, they had all also passed through gorgeous vistas. Northern North Dakota was pretty well coated with snow, but we still saw several small groups of mule deer, ring-necked pheasants, pigeons, magpies, and a lone coyote. Along with the cows and horses, of course!

We stayed in the lounge car for several hours so I could catch up on this journal and try to get photos of interesting things before the train passed them by. I got approximately 1,000,000 photos of the intense, red sunset, which also produced a kind of column of light as the sun dipped below the horizon. Once the sun had pretty well set, there wasn’t a lot left to see in the lounge car, so we headed back to the roomette until dinner.

The meals for the sleeping car passengers on Amtrak are pretty generous, and they seem to be even more so on the Western long-distance journeys. Both breakfast and lunch are pretty huge plates of whichever dish you order and the dinner is three courses. For our final night on the Empire Builder (all the long-distance trains have different names), Mom and I both got the steak for our main, which was a fantastic choice, though she had the lobster crab cake for a starter and I had the green chile cheese tamale (YUM) while she had the carrot cake and I had the chocolate torte for dessert. But I don’t think there’s been a meal so far that we haven’t enjoyed.

We had a pretty early night, all things considered, and I zonked out about 10:45 (making sure I’d done my Duolingo first, because no one wants to lose a streak!). We were still in Montana at that point and were running about three hours behind. The train would get into Spokane early in the morning, where it would actually split into two trains—one to Seattle and one to Portland, OR. So we’d be waking up in the Pacific time zone and with a smaller train than we started with. No lounge car in the morning, but the dining car was coming with us!