Why I’m Not At Work Today…

Here, belatedly, is why you don’t have a normal scheduled blog post today.

For the last six months, one of my sisters and I have been planning a train trip from Minneapolis to Chicago, Chicago to LA, LA to San Francisco, San Francisco to Portland, and Portland back to Minneapolis. We were supposed to leave on Sunday, January 28, at 8:50 a.m. on the Empire Builder.

At 5:30 a.m., my phone goes off—a text from the Amtrak app, “YOUR TRAIN HAS BEEN CANCELED!” So I go to email a note to my sister, and there’s also an email from Amtrak—“If you got a notification that your train has been canceled please ignore it. We have arranged buses to get you to Chicago, leaving at normal departure time.” No explanation, but according to Google, there was a freight train derailment blocking the tracks somewhere between Spokane and Minneapolis…

So we take the bus to Chicago. It was a very nice bus, but still not the start of the trip we’d expected. We had a 23-hour layover in Chicago (even if the train had been on time), so we didn’t have to stress about catching the next train. We checked into the hotel and had a lovely meal at the rooftop restaurant. And back in the room, I realized I had forgotten my meds.

Good news: there was a Walgreens a block from the hotel. Bad news: not open on Sunday.

We bed down for the night. My sister wakes up next morning sniffling, so when we stop at the pharmacy to get the emergency temporary fill of my meds, she picked up a Covid test, just in case. We get on the train, where we had individual roomettes (tiny sleeper seats), and she takes the test. Which is positive.

Since we had just spent the night sleeping in the same hotel room, I figured I was going to get it, too. So we isolated in the roomettes—no dining car, no observation car (which had kind of been the point of taking the train). Luckily, I had never unpacked the N-95 masks I’d put in my suitcase during the height of the pandemic. We left Chicago at midday Monday and were supposed to arrive in LA around 9 a.m. Wednesday.

By Monday evening, the electric power on the train started stuttering. This didn’t affect me much, as my devices were charged up, but it continued all night…and my sister uses a CPAP. She’s also a light, restless sleeper, and of course was feeling worse and worse as her Covid developed. So she got almost no sleep on Monday and Tuesday. The power issues continued through the next day, and the train pulled over twice to “fix a minor mechanical issue,” which, rumor had it, was trouble with one of the engines that both generated power and pulled the train. This culminated in the electric power to the cars being cut off entirely for half an hour in order for the engines to have enough oomph to get us up a hill (they announced this over the PA).

Because of all the delays, the train missed its “slot” for using the tracks, and kept having to stop to let freight trains and local commuter trains go by, all through New Mexico. As a result, we were 9 hours late getting in to LA—Wednesday night instead of Wednesday morning. And it was raining.

We went to the hotel and my sister sacked out right away. I canceled the next couple of days of tickets I’d gotten for museums and things we’d planned. On Thursday, I started having symptoms and my sister needed more distilled water for her CPAP, so another trip to a nearby pharmacy for water, Covid tests, and more masks, and isolating in the hotel room. At least it had a nice view.

Friday morning, I tested positive…just as my sister was feeling better and coming off her recommended 5-day isolation period. Luckily, neither of us had any major symptoms—mostly just medium-level cold plus fatigue. I slept a lot. My sister decided to fly home from San Francisco, as she didn’t think she could face three nights in a row of bad sleep (San Francisco to Portland was one night; Portland to Minneapolis was two more). So I set about getting the last half of her ticket canceled, and after a lot of back-and-forth running around (for reasons), they said everything was fine, and emailed me a new electronic version of the ticket.

By Sunday, our last day in LA, my sister felt well enough to go do something (I was still sleeping all day). Except that Sunday was the “rainpocalypse” in LA—it poured all day. Monday, we awoke to more Amtrak texts—the rain had washed out a section of tracks between LA and San Francisco, so we were getting a bus to catch a different train to get us there. On that train, we discovered that the new electronic ticket had been issued as two tickets in my sister’s name, instead of one for her, ending in San Francisco, and one for me, getting all the way back to Minneapolis. This, the conductor said, could only be fixed at the station window in San Francisco.

The bus-train ride was interesting. The route ran along the Los Angeles River for a way, and it actually looked like a river in full spring flood, instead of like a giant storm ditch. We also got to see quite a few waterfalls on the mountains that hadn’t been there (or at least, hadn’t been visible at a distance) before. It was also fascinating to be driving through green hills (from the less-apocalyptic rain they’d been getting for the week or so before we got there) and then wind around a mountain and suddenly see nothing but brown.

We got in to San Francisco around 6 p.m. I went straight to the station window to get the ticket fixed. The attendant was very nice, and tried to help, but in the end could only give me a number to call.

I called from the hotel room, explained carefully, and got yet another electronic ticket, this one for one person. It took maybe five minutes…once I had the correct person to talk to. The problem was apparently due to out-of-date computer program being unable to cope with two tickets on the same credit card being treated differently.

We spent Tuesday in San Francisco. Both of us were feeling somewhat better, so we masked up and went for a walk along the Embarcadero, and sat and watched the ocean for a while. It was a lovely sunny day, about 61F with very little wind. And there wasn’t a crowd. Nicest day of the whole trip.

I got on the train to Portland and settled into my roomette. The rest of the trip was really uneventful. I think we ended up being around half an hour late in to Minneapolis, which isn’t bad for the Empire Builder.

I’m feeling much better now, though I am still resting a lot and have rotten stamina. At this point, I’m not sure whether it’s lingering Covid or from not doing anything but sleep and read for a week.

But that’s why I didn’t get this week’s blog post written.