Home From the Holidays!

Darlings! I’m finally back!

I’ve had a dreadful month, with the most tacky sinus infection you are ever going to run across. I’ll spare you the ugly, ugly details – suffice to say that I was in no mood to discuss matters of taste.

So where did I leave off? Ah yes, Home to Council Bluffs/Omaha. Well, the Zephyr home was a delight. But then there’s Omaha. Poor, dear, trashy, misguided Omaha…...

If you want to see the heart of a red state, Midwest-style, you need to take a trip there. The radio stations are banal: You have a choice of Country, Rap, Oldies, and scary angry talk radio. Even the NPR stations are dreary – all classical and jazz music formats, which are guaranteed to put you to sleep.

The only stores are in malls, which are dreary and smell bad. They don’t really merchandise in the stores, because the people who shop there don’t know any better. The epitome of “class” is West Omaha, which is nothing but malls, strip malls, and ugly new housing. In short, the place sucks.

But the Zephyr on the way back to Chicago was nice, and the second night at the Palmer House was delightful. The next day came the highlight of the trip: My journey from Chicago to Los Angeles on the Southwest Chief.

Of all the Amtrak trains in the west, the Southwest Chief is hands-down the best: It’s almost always on-time, the crew is terrific, and the scenery is amazing. If you take only one Amtrak trip in your life, it should be the Chief. It leaves Chicago in the Afternoon, and reaches Kansas City by late in the evening. You wake up the next morning in Colorado (having slept through dreary Kansas) and spend the day ogling the Rockies, and then crossing the desert. After an extended mid-afternoon stop in Albuquerque (where local vendors set up stands along the platform, and you can get the BEST burritos ever) you reach Flagstaff late that evening. Early the next morning, you are in LA.

You’ve heard me rhapsodize about LA Union Station before, so I will spare you. THAT. Instead, I shall now expound (briefly) on the impossibility of getting a good mocha in LA.

I had a few hours to kill before my next train, so I went in search of a mocha. The coffee shop in the station gave me a disgusting luke-warm thing that I was afraid to drink after I saw the machine it came off of, so I took the subway to the Civic Center stop thinking SURELY there would be at least a Starbucks somewhere, but I was wrong.

I finally found what looked to be a nice coffee stand in the weird little mall across the street from the police headquarters, and over from City Hall, but when I ordered my drink, the lady behind the counter started getting all fancy-pants with syrups and such, finally presenting me with a veritable French Poodle of a beverage.

I mention this only because it seems something of a metaphor for Angelinos: They always have to make everything more complicated than it needs to be.

So I headed back to the train station, and got on the Coast Starlight, and began my odyssey up the west coast.

As we had come into LA, I had noticed that the LA river, which is usually just an empty channel, was actually a full-bodied river. The west coast storms had just started to hit, although it was sunny and warm in LA that day. As we headed up the coast, the weather would start to play a bigger role in our trip.

Things were fine until we got over the pass that is north of San Luis Obispo and started into the bay area. Storms there had caused a blackout of the signals, so we were late getting into San Francisco, and pretty much crawled through the corridor from San Jose to Sacramento.

When I woke up early the next morning, we were not yet to Dunsmuir, in northern California, which would make us about five hours late. We got further delayed in Dunsmuir, waiting for a new crew.

This was OK by me, as this area, around Mount Shasta, is an area you don’t usually get to see, and with the snow that had recently fallen, it was gorgeous. The downside was that this was New Year’s Eve day, and I didn’t want to get stuck on a late train on New Years.

We made it out of Dunsmuir and up through to Klamath Falls, Oregon, and then over the Cascades without further delay, but we were still several hours late, with the projection being that we would arrive in to Portland just before midnight. So I decided to jump ship and spend New Years in Portland.

It should be noted that Amtrak had tried to make the best of things, by providing Champagne and sparkling cider to the passengers, which was a nice touch, but still I didn’t want to be on a train at midnight, not to mention the thrill of arriving into Seattle at four AM or so.

So I got off in Portland (where there was this really horrible woman who was screaming obscenities at her male companion) and headed over to The Benson Hotel, where I got a room, and then headed off to the bars.

Portland on New Years was a lot of fun, but by the next morning, I really wanted to be home. So I caught the 12:30 Cascades train to Seattle, and finally arrived back into town.

Since then, I have been busy with the house. There’s lots of new things to show you, and I hope to have some new pics up soon, so keep watching.