night in Chicago

Crown Fountains in Millennium Park
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9.25.06 7:40am We have stopped in St. Paul, Minnesota. We are right on time. It was a fitful night of sleep. I couldn’t get comfortable in the seat. I only slept for about four hours, but I feel rested, though I always feel that way when I don’t get a whole lot of sleep. I slept off and on during the trip yesterday though, so no big deal. We stopped here for a decent amount of time to let a bunch of people on. Everyone around me that got off was replaced with someone new. The only bad part of the trip so far, is this girl that came on late in ND and sat with this guy across from me. She talked non-stop on her phone until the service ran out and felt the need to punctuate her sentences with a curse word for every other word. It was incredibly annoying. Ahh, but it was nothing headphones couldn’t remedy. Still it just shows a lack of consideration of others.

Crown fountains. One side is color that changes, the other is nature video, or video of people.
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11:12am We’ve stopped in La Crosse, Wisconsin. We were on time getting here, but we are now waiting for the track maintenance crew to clear the tracks so that we can continue on. They expect us to leave by 11:37, that would be about 50 minutes after we got here, so unless we don’t make it up, we’ll be that much behind, and I’ll be stuck with only an hour in Chicago like last time. Oh well, I’ll take what I can get.

Well, another adventure for me

portrait of me in a huge silver reflective orb.
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3:11pm The train is now late. Two hours late to be exact. This means that unless we make up time, I will not make my next train. I’ve been trying to make sense of the schedules I have and it seems like that might be the last train to Michigan tonight. Maybe they’ll put me on a bus, I’ll have to ask the conductor what the best coarse of action would be. It was too good to be true for too long. I knew this would happen. Well, another adventure for me. Maybe I’ll get compensated and get put up in a hotel till tomorrow morning, that would be awesome!

8:00pm So it happened! I did get put up in a hotel and money for food, and cab. It was only a couple blocks down, and while looking at a street map, a homeless guy offered to walk me to the Holiday Inn Suites. So I took him up on it. He was great! He showed me the fastest way to get there and gave me a verbal tour as we went, letting me know where good places to eat where, and which part of town was what. It was better than a cab. I paid him what I would’ve paid the cab and checked in. It turns out my room would have cost $249 a night if I were buying. There was a swimming pool on the roof, but it was being repaired so I couldn’t take a dip. I dropped off my stuff and walked around downtown for a while. Got something to eat at Bennigan’s, and then headed back to the hotel. I decided to take the train that leaves at 1:15pm instead of the 7:50am train, so I can walk around a little more in the morning, and I’m not rushed. A great ending to the trip. Now I’m only roughly five hours from home. I’ll be there before I know it!

“Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me.” - Thoreau