train log! or is that tiles…you know, since we’re on a track and all
(wrote this Saturday, June 3rd. Not sure when I’ll be connected enough to post it)
That was a lot closer than I intended it to be.
I decided last minute to head down to Portland for the weekend, although I suppose that last minute is a slight conceit, in that I consider going down to Portland every weekend, but usually beg off due to costs (or lately, due to girls).
Friday evening, plan in hand, Will Shatner and Priceline once again ensured me a relatively cheap hotel, although there’s some kind of festival/parade happening so it’s The Double Tree instead of The Nice Four Star Downtown™ that my cheap, internet using ass usually stays at.
Non-refundable hotel reservation in hand, I realized the last thing I was up for was a three hour drive to Portland followed by a four hour drive back1
Enter Amtrak2. It’s been years since I rode a train anywhere and while a last minute ticket is still more expensive than a tank of gas, once you multiply cost by the Pain In The Ass Constant, you come out ahead.
A small aside. You pass through some of the most, um “interesting” parts of town when you’re first pulling out of the urban train stations. Interesting has been placed between inverted commas, or if you like quotes, not to provide a subtle hint that the word interesting should not be interpreted with it’s dictionary definition, but instead I mean, if not the exact opposite, then something close to it. A secret handshake between you and me that the word interesting doesn’t accurately describe the situation.
Specifically, no one sane3 wants to live near train tracks, and most of our crumbling infrastructure is located near the train tracks, from the says when it wasn’t crumbling. No one wants to live near crumbling infrastructure either. So, until you hit the country side, your view consists of graffiti-clad warehouse, shitty strip malls4, and the kind of subdivisions where you’re not sure if there are three pickup truck cabs in the front yard, or if someone has decided to bury three pickup trucks up to their cabs. Or some combination of the two.
My aside aside, I booked a train trip “down south”5 that was scheduled to leave at 7:30 AM. I figured leave home at 6:30, get to the station at 7:00, plenty of time to pickup my tickets and get on the train.
The last time I took a train anywhere…probably twelve years ago…I went to the gate, got my ticket, and got on the train. After a brief delay at the parking garage (it was pre-pay, I didn’t have cash, had to use my credit card, etc. etc.) I walked into the station at 7:15 to find one of those lines that makes your gut drop out and think “oh shit, I am so totally screwed”. Then I saw a second line for seat assignment that did the same thing.
Fortunately, the military industrial automated machine complex saved my ass. Rather than wait in the long ticketing line, I was able to use an automated kiosk to print out my tickets, and then the booking line moved a lot quicker than I expected. Still, the train took-off about two minutes after I was seated and ready to go.
I have no idea if they’d have left with a passenger who was in the seat assignment line, but hadn’t gotten their seat yet. Like most Americans I have no idea how the whole train procedure works. Although, the fact I know there are still passenger trains at all probably puts me well ahead of my “can’t find the countries we’re bombing on a map” brethren.
Now that we’re past Olympia the scenery has gotten a bit better. There’s still the occasional house-in-questionable-repair, but for the most part it’s green as far as the eye can see.
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Bloody television, you can’t escape the cathode ray. There’s an in-trip movie playing, The Pink Panther;
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1. Remember that whole sub-plot in Singles, where ACTOR’S-NAME character spent the whole movie working on a Super Train project to solve Seattle’s gridlock problem, only to get shot down by the mayor in 2 minutes, including a rather disturbing close-up of ACTOR’S-NAME teeth? It’s only gotten worse in the nearly decade and a half since.
2. I’m always interested by what Corporations are listed my computer’s spellcheck dictionary, and which companies are not, especially if contrasted with which countries are listed in my computer’s spell check dictionary and which ones are not. I always initially spell Amtrak and Amtrack.
3. Train enthusiasts are not sane
4. Malls are one of those mistakes that we don’t give “The Greatest Generation” enough shit for. Irrespective of the interior, on the outside they are always monstrous blights on the landscape. An ugly result of an ugly post World Wor II car and consumer culture run amuck.
5. Going back to the bit about the quotes, down south is in quotes because, while I am headed south, in America the phrase down south usually refers to the states which were Confederate during the US Civil war, as well as the four slave states which sided with the Union and got to keep their slaves for a bit longer. Also, as long as I’m here, I should acknowledge that this isn’t a intentional aping of David Foster Wallace’s style, it’s just that footnotes are a useful construct if you want to ramble off on tangents but not disrupt the narrative flow of whatever it is you’re writing.
Originally Posted June 04, 2006