For the first time ever, I am writing a post from a moving train. Gotta love technology! According to the GPS on my iPhone, the train is moving at 80.2 mph, which sounds about right. I am on Amtrak's California Zephyr, in eastern Iowa, heading west to Salt Lake City, UT. The train is scheduled to arrive there tomorrow evening.
The holidays have been fun and exciting, as always. I left Utah on Christmas Eve, just before midnight, and flew overnight to Kennedy Airport in New York. I arrived there early in the morning on Christmas Day. The weather was good, and I got out to my grandparents' house without a hitch. Everything was pretty quiet since it was Christmas, but being New York, it was not entirely dead, the way most cities are. Transit still ran every half hour, some stores and restaurants were open, and things generally moved, although slower than usual.
After Christmas, it began to snow. Steven and Michael were scheduled to take the train from Boston to New York, and got on without any problems. It was barely snowing when they started out, 250 miles away. As they traveled, and as the day progressed, the snow continued to fall, and continued to fall harder. Tim and I kept shoveling the driveway to stay ahead of the storm. We were anticipating that we would have to go out to pick up Steven and Michael, when they arrived at the Mineola station. We figured it would be easier to shovel a little snow several times, rather than a lot all at once.
Steven and Michael arrived in Penn Station, in New York, without any problems. Their train had been delayed only about ten minutes by the weather. They got ready to catch the Long Island Rail Road to Mineola as planned. By this point, over a foot of snow had fallen. By my standards, that is not a lot, but in New York, it is a ton! Just as Steven and Michael went to catch their train, it was announced that all service on the Long Island Rail Road had been suspended due to the weather. No trains would be running until further notice, and no one knew when further notice would be.
Fortunately, Steven and Michael are usually pretty resourceful. The New York subways were still running, at least where they operate underground. A neighborhood in Queens, called Jamaica, is the main hub for the railroad, and the subway operates underground out to there. Steven and Michael hopped on a subway, in hopes that once in Jamaica they could catch one of the last operating Long Island Rail Road trains. Unfortunately when they got to Jamaica, they found that the situation was the same. They were less than ten miles from their destination, yet they couldn't get any trains there. Next they began looking into taking the bus, which is slower, but not out of the question. As they went looking for a bus, they found several stuck in the unplowed streets. No plows had been around at all, and the buses were simply abandoned where they had gotten stuck. It seemed that they were not going any farther soon.
Steven and Michael kept me posted on their progress, which was great until they got to the Big Apple. There it simply stopped. They elected to remain in Jamaica, since the station was warm and sheltered. They found a piece of floor that looked comfortable and went to sleep. There was nothing else to be done. The next morning, we all awoke to another foot of snow on the ground. Tim and I looked out the window in Garden City and found that the streets had been cleared. Although a lot of snow had fallen, driving was not a problem. Steven and Michael reported a different situation though. In Queens, the snow was still all over the streets. Buses were still stuck and nothing was running. The Long Island Rail Road had made no announcements on an anticipated start time or date. Everything was just silent as far as the railroad was concerned. In Mineola, where Tim and I were, buses were running and things were getting going again. There were delays, but things were starting to move. Again, Steven and Michael reported the opposite. They waited there most of the day, hoping for something, and seeing very little activity. Eventually, i got a phone call from them, to let me know they had found a bus going to Mineola. It was one of just two that were able to get through the still buried Queens streets. I met them at the Mineola station, where the buses drop off. It took them a record 27:30 to travel about 250 miles between Nashua, NH, and Garden City, NY!
The next day, the Long Island Rail Road announced that it was operating again, although on a very limited schedule. A couple of lines would be running hourly trains to Manhattan. We all went down to the station, because we were scheduled to take the train back to Boston, to go to Nashua for a few days. We waited at the Mineola station for two hours. When the train finally came, we could no longer feel our noses or ears or toes, but we were happy to be going somewhere. People on the platform clapped and cheered as the train pulled in. From there, things operated pretty smoothly. There were minor delays here and there, but once we were on the train to New York, things ran pretty well. The Amtrak trip went smoothly all the way to Boston. Once in Boston, we took the train to Lowell, MA, where we were met by my mom. She drove the bunch of us up to Nashua, and we spent the next couple days in that area.
Over the next few days we had some fun adventures. We would have like to get up to Montreal, but time really did not allow for that. We did go up to Vermont to visit the Joseph Smith birthplace. That was quite nice, although rather cold and windy. We also spent a day in Boston. We saw the Old North Church, and Copps Hill Burial Ground, both of which predate the American Revolution. Copps Hill Burial Ground was founded in 1659. Two people buried there were actually born in the 1590's! Some of the newer graves in there are from the early 1800's. The Old North Church is near the Paul Revere Home. Paul Revere made his midnight ride from Boston to Lexington and Concord, to warn the residents that the British were coming. He went by horseback in the middle of the night. At the same time as he was riding out to those towns, a signal was shown for a few minutes from the steeple of the Old North Church. There would be one lantern if the British went by land, and two if they went by sea. Two were shown, indicating that they were going by sea. This was to warn people in those towns in the event that Paul Revere was caught. He would have been arrested for breaking a curfew imposed by the soldiers in Boston at the time. The next day the fighting broke out between the British and the colonists in Lexington.
After spending some time there, we went over to Haymarket for some pizza. Michael showed us around the North End. He is most familiar with that area, as he will be going to school there in a few weeks. From there we went over to the Charlestown Navy Yard, on the other side of the Charles River. There we went aboard the U.S.S. Constitution. That ship is an old wooden Frigate, built in 1797. It is the oldest ship afloat in the world, and it is the oldest commissioned naval vessel in the world. She is known as, "Old Ironsides," because of her ability to stop cannon balls during the War of 1812. Today she is the flagship of the American Naval Fleet, even at 213 years old!
On Saturday we decided to visit my Memere, in Sanford, ME. Rather than drive, as we usually would, Tim rented a plane and we flew up there. It is normally a drive of just under two hours. It was a flight of thirty minutes. Memere met us at the airport, and then we visited with her for a couple hours. Mom decided last minute to come along and surprise her mother. It had been a while since we all visited together, and it was quite nice. When we left Sanford, we could have flown straight back to Nashua, but we decided to do a little flightseeing along the Maine coast. There are lots of lighthouses we wanted to see, so we flew east from Sanford, and then followed the coast south for a ways. Since we were over the Atlantic Ocean, we did not have to be very high. We got up close to the lighthouses to get a good view. This did get a little attention from people walking on the beaches. I guess they were not used to having an airplane fly over just 500 feet above them! It really was a beautiful trip back from Maine. That evening we visited with some the Davises, some other friends in the area.
Yesterday afternoon, we boarded the Lake Shore Limited in Boston. That train got us to Chicago five minutes ahead of schedule this morning. In Chicago we went to the top of the former Sears Tower, now known as the Willis Tower. We also got ourselves a Chicago style, deep dish pizza, much to the envy of some of the other passengers, and crew, on this train. Now, as I write this, I am sitting on the California Zephyr, racing west across Iowa. Tomorrow we will the end the trip, in Utah.
