wednesday, september 24

Wednesday on the train.  by now it feels like this is home.  we have figured out how to be more comfortable sleeping, how to manuever the doors (tougher than it sounds), where the restrooms are located and most importantly, where the lounge car is located.   the lounge car is about 50-60 feet long with about 16 booths and about 24 lounge type chairs and lots of big windows including skylights.  downstairs is the snack bar with snacking stuff-imagine that!.  there is also a dining car where we ate dinner last night and lunch today.  very nice and the food was decent.

the train we are on now is the Empire Builder, going from Chicago to Seattle.  it has about 11 cars including the engine.  it is a double decker train with most of the seating on the top level.  the bottom level is special seating, restrooms, snack bar, and staff housing, depending what  car it is.   earlier on this trip, there were about 20-25 amish folks on the train from Chicago to somewhere in Wisconsin.  it was kind of interesting listening to them chatter among themselves in german.

we woke this morning to really, really flat vistas as we were traveling through Minnesota and North Dakota.  there were some interesting looking wind breaks of trees everywhere.  eventually, the land gave way to slight hills, actually looked like a minature version of the Endless Mountains and some really interesting rock formations.  when we have WIFI, we’ll figure out exactly what they are called.  we saw a lot of oil wells and gas wells and tons and tons of tanker cars on the sidelines.  one of the guys we talked to is from Iowa, but travels to North Dakota a few weeks at a time, and then off for a few weeks.  he and his wife are also farmers and raise Beefalo.    

this East end of  Montana, it is rather flat, too, with some rolling hills, not many trees and lots of cattle.  when we cross over a road and look up and down, the road seems to go on forever.   it must be really boring to drive on this level straight roads. this is considered High Plains as we are about 2000 ft and climbing.  

i learned to play Cribbage from a guy that shared our dinner table yesterday.  he is very patient and we’ll probably play again later.  in the lounge car, there are 2-3 card games going on, a bunch of kids doing a jigsaw puzzle, many folks on their electronic devises and othere just watching the world go by.  This is just a super way to travel.  

the variety of folks on the train make it perfect for people watching.  we see so many faces that look familiar.  Than and i play a game of “who does that look like to you”  

we had a pretty sunset over Wisconsin yesterday and since the rain cleared up, it looks like we’ll be able to see another one today.  we are looking forward to sleeping in a bed tonight.

later the same day--well, we sort of saw a great sunset.  unfortunatley the train was heading due west and we actually saw part of the sky, not the actual sunset. i wanted to ask the engineer if i could watch out the front window, but Than didn’t think that was really a good ideai do understand why Montana is called Big Sky country.  we arrived at Glacier East in the dark, so we don’t really know what the surroundings look like.  we’re at the Dancing Bear Inn and it has nothing to do with the Greatful Dead.