At the end of my last post, I had settled in for the night in my roomette and slept surprisingly well. In the morning, I woke up to the view shown above, a view that would pretty much dominate the landscape once we left Colorado and until the train reached its final destination at Chicago's Union Station - miles and miles of endless cornfields! I got myself ready for the day and headed to the dining car for an early breakfast.
The breakfast menu had a decent number of choices, freshly prepared of course. I opted for the simple scrambled eggs with cheese and fried potatoes, and enjoyed my tasty and well-cooked breakfast. My only objection was that, as a tea drinker, I only had the option of Lipton tea, which I do not like. Fortunately I always bring my own teabags when I travel, so I asked for hot water and milk and brewed my own cup of Twinings English Breakfast tea. After breakfast I headed back to my room, which the car attendant had set up for the day by folding up the bed, removing the sheets, and setting up the seating areas again. I was still feeling a bit queasy, but I was able to do a few stretches in my roomette by bracing my feet against the opposing seats to keep from falling over on the moving train! Then I sat down to read and watch the cornfields go by, getting out at the few stops where we had time to disembark to walk around and get some fresh air.
We were due to arrive in Chicago in the early afternoon and luckily our train was on time. After spending about 24 hours on the train, I was ready for a break on solid ground! I received a message from Amtrak before arriving at the station which let me know that, because I was a passenger in a sleeping car, I had the privilege of waiting for my connecting train to Pittsburgh in the Metropolitan Lounge. Having never been to this station before I was not quite sure where to find the lounge, but I asked a couple of security guards for directions and found it pretty easily. I showed my ticket to the attendant at the counter in the entrance to the lounge, where I was given a ticket for use of the lounge and waved through to the seating area.
The lounge is not fancy, but it is clean and has plenty of comfortable seating as well as outlets for recharging any devices such as phones. There are also snacks and beverages available (I think they are free but I did not get any so I am not sure), as well as several televisions set on a couple of not very exciting stations (game shows or old TV shows). I only had a few hours to wait for my train, and I was fortunate enough to sit near a couple of women who were friendly and chatty, so I passed the time pleasantly until my train to Pittsburgh arrived right on time. One of the women unfortunately had to wait hours for her long-delayed train to San Francisco, and another train passenger mentioned that the station had pretty much shut down the night before because of an unexpected loss of power, so I was very lucky to have arrived when I did! When my train arrived a porter escorted all passengers from the lounge to the boarding platform so that we would not have to wander around trying to find it ourselves, which was very convenient.
The train trip to Pittsburgh was about 12 hours and pretty much mostly overnight. We boarded in time to have dinner, so after I dropped my belongings in my roomette I went to the dining car. I shared a table with another woman passenger and we both ordered the salmon from the menu. There was no chef on this train, so unfortunately the meals were pretty much the same as prepackaged airplane food, edible but not especially good. My poor fellow passenger was on her way to South Carolina, and the approaching Hurricane Idalia meant that her train from Washington DC to her final destination had been cancelled. She would be stuck in DC until Amtrak could reschedule her train, and because the cancellation was weather-related she was responsible for finding a place to stay until then. She planned to spend her time waiting in the train station lounge instead of trying to find a hotel, which sounded ghastly to me. Apparently if a cancellation is due to some sort of man-made snafu, such as the power outage in Chicago, Amtrak is responsible for accommodating passengers, but if cancellations are weather-related then Amtrak is off the hook. So my tip number five when traveling by train is to try to avoid destinations and/or times of year when inclement weather may lead to train cancellations!
My train was scheduled to arrive at Pittsburgh's Union Station at 5 o'clock in the morning, and my brother who still lives in the area was coming to pick me up. For some reason, even though we were traveling at night, the train ended up being an hour late. I texted this information to my brother so that he would not have to wait at the station for an hour. The train station in Pittsburgh is undergoing renovations so it is not looking at its best right now, but thankfully my brother was there to meet me so I did not have to wait in the station. It was actually a good thing that the train arrived so early in the morning, as the station is right in the middle of the downtown area and later in the day traffic would be horrendous.
I finally arrived at my destination for my family's little Labor Day reunion, still a bit queasy, in need of a shower because I was not willing to take my chances on falling in the train shower on a moving train, hungry because I disembarked so early in the morning that breakfast was not available, and desperate for a chance to take a good walk for some exercise after spending so much time sitting or lying down on the train. But at least I made it!
In the next post and hopefully final post in this series, I will give a quick summary of my visit and then describe my return trip by train. And you will finally find out if I considered this mode of travel worth it! See you in the next post for my trip back home.
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