Hi guys! It’s Nicole! Guess what! I crossed the Mississippi River on a train! If you have not been on a train before then I’ll explain it to you. A train goes a bit faster than a car but is bumpy. The aisle is about 3 feet wide. The trains we have ridden so far have leg rests, foot rests, and outlets. One even had Wi-Fi! We have been in many, many, states (also, David and I have listened to many, many, “Weird Al” Yankovic songs). : )
I’ll blog again in a few days,
Nicole
P.S. For a while the land was one flat, giant, corn and soy bean
field.
Nicole crossing the Mississippi
If you have never taken a long distance Amtrak train before it is an interesting experience. I can't say I'd recommend it - yet. I'm still up in the air. As Nicole said they are comfortable. The seats have lots of room. Power and WiFi are nice creature comforts. Need a new book for your Kindle? No problem. Visibility out the windows is excellent. Our conductors were great. The problem is 10PM to 7AM. The seats recline - a lot. But they are built for bigger people than we are and are just not comfortable for sleeping. And Nicole nailed the other problem. It's a train. You are constantly jostled this way and that. It makes for a pretty lousy sleep.
We were over 3 hours late getting into Chicago so our planned outing there went by the wayside. A victim of being stuck behind a broken down freight train somewhere west of Buffalo at 1AM. I guess you just don't call out a tow truck for that one. We had just enough time to grab lunch in Chicago and wait in a very long line to board the train to Omaha. This train was a double decker and we were on the top. Nice views.
One of the reasons we took the train was to see the US at a distance other than 30,000 feet. We did. And it was eye opening. I have heard the term Rust Belt so many times I can't begin to count. But I never really thought about it for more than 5 seconds. The tracks that Amtrak uses are mostly freight train tracks. Heavy industry needs train access so it locates along tracks. We got a first hand view of heavy industry from Buffalo to Chicago. The industrial complex this country built up in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois is mind blowing. Steel mills and manufacturing facilities of all kinds. For mile after mile a continuous stream of it passes by the windows. Most of it seems to be abandoned and rotting away. Huge parking lots full of broken concrete and weeds. A couple mile long US Steel plant in Indiana without a sign of human activity, maybe for years. I get it now. Rust Belt.
As impressive as the scale of industry headed into Chicago is, the scale of agriculture past Chicago is much more vast. In NY we have farm fields. They are islands plunked in the middle of forest, towns, lakes and hills. In the Midwest and Plains states we humans somehow managed to reverse that. We turned several states into one continuous corn / soy bean field. A town or lake is an island in that field. You see pockets of trees in the middle of that field but not a forest. When you look at it from a big picture it is in an impressive feat to accomplish in 150 years.
Log post. Sorry about that. Now that we are in a more regular travel mode we should be posting once a day.
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