It has been interesting blowing through all of these midwestern towns.  It has hammered into me the reality that I live in a very prosperous place in the USA, maybe the world.  The houses on the main are much more humble in a lot of these towns, and I don't see all the new cars that I see in Tacoma and Seattle.

I always admired John Cougar Mellencamp for his visions of the midwest.  I like Bob Seger for the same reason.  When I'm making some cursory judgement about how things are based upon casual observation, if I'm honest, I have to say that I probably bring some preconcieved notions into my judgement.  I guess that's OK as I'm not being nationally published and I acknowledge that my opinions may be grossly mistaken.

For breakfast we sat with a couple from Indiana.  They, like us, were on a vacation.  He is a retired plumber, and she worked for a stock broker.  They have five kids, all grown and they were a bit younger than us (I think).  When Kristi told them that we were musicians the first question from Deb was "do you play Christian music".  Kristi named the two Christian songs that we play and no more questions.  I knew we weren't going to talk politics.  I realize that folks who inhabit the big demographic, people who make the wheels in this country go, are not the same as we are.  

After seeing the relative poverty of the midwest, and the southwest I wonder how Trump managed to hornswoggle all of these people.  These are people who take it for granted that they will never need ga social safety net, and are convinced that they are paying for a lot of people who should have their sleeves rolled up and be working just like they are.  There's a certain arrogance there.  I blame it on the American dream and the idea that we all should live in a house with a 2 car garage, and maybe a swimming pool.  Debbie and Dan have a house on a lake.  I don't envy them.  They (especially Dan) have busted their asses to have what they've got.

We are on the last leg of our journey.  Tomorrow morning we will get into King Street Station in Seattle.  We're not totally sure how we will get to Tacoma, having more than one option but David G. thinks he can find us a ride from the Angle Lake light rail station.

Right now we are running over the plains of North Dakota.  It actually looks fairly prosperous to me, mostly agricultural land.  There's still a dusting of snow everywhere and lots of frozen water.

When we were in Canada I had little news.  There didn't seem to be any newspapers where we stopped and Via Rail definitely didn't have wifi.  Now I can get news if I want it through cell phone towers.  I even found a newspaper at a news stand in Albany, New York when they gave us a little time to get off of the train.  The only place we got off of the train on this leg of the journey there wasn't even a vending machine to get a can of pop, much less a news stand.  You've heard the term "sleepwalking into autocracy"?  I think that's what we're doing, and I've been doing my share of sleepwalking on this entire trip.  Time to wakey, wakey.  

 We spent the better part of today (Feb. 28, 2025) in New York City.  We got in on the 27th fairly late in the evening, but early enough to get out to a restaurant for dinner.  On the 27th (Wednesday) we got on a train in Toronto, Ontario CA and rode it all the way to New York City.  I think I said something about the ride through Niagara (where we went through American customs) and all of those familiar upstate New York towns like Syracuse, Albany, Rome, etc.  It was an Amtrak train, but the crew out of Toronto was Canadian and they switched to an American crew in Niagara.

We had a reservation in a Holiday Inn.  Our room was on the 22nd floor and had a pretty good view, although the windows were really dirty.  That meant that my camera with its auto focus wanted to focus on the dirt on the window instead of what was out side the window.  We were focused on getting out of the room anyway and did get out - walked over to Penn St. Station and put our luggage in a storage spot provided by Amtrak for $10 a piece, so we didn't leave everything there.  We just left our roller bags.  We also met David G. there.  The booker for the trip put him in a different hotel from us.  Fortunately the clerk at the Holiday Inn managed to find his hotel and after going out to dinner he took a cab over there, and then met us at Penn St. Station.  

We all went to have a bite to eat at a food court near where we left our luggage.  Then Kristi and I walked out into the streets of New York to find the Hop On, Hop Off bus which was part of our tour package.  As it turned out it was a fairly long walk to get to the place where they confirmed our ticket and got us onto a bus.  

When we first got on the bus we went inside the bus. I realized fairly quickly that we would see almost nothing from the interior of the bus, and we spotted folks going up a little stairway which Kristi instantly knew was the "stairway to heaven".  Well. . . not exactly heaven, but exterior seats on the roof of the bus from which you could see the city as we rolled through it.  They also provided ear buds which plugged into an audio system that briefed you on what you were seeing.

 Of  course many times we were borderline aware of what we were seeing.  The audio threw in a few New York City songs such as "A New York State of Mind" by Billy Joel.  There were a number of musical interludes in the audio program, and some silly jokes too.  Eventually it got cold, was windy, and not as much fun as the initial bus ride, but it was sunny, and the visibility was good.  

At one point it was so windy that I changed my hat from western style cowboy to a cloth cap that would stay on my head a little better and still keep my head warm.  We are now on a train to Chicago where we will catch the train to Seattle and home.  It is Friday and we'll get home on Monday.  We'll see you there.

 We are in Toronto.  It was a long rail journey to get here.  I'm unsure of my opinion of rail travel just now.  I didn't think the travel itself was a barrel of monkeys.  The company we kept was good, and I enjoyed many conversations with people.  

I felt confined on the train.  I guess there was quite a bit of room, but generally I was sitting most of the time and, really, there weren't many places to go, and the places you could go on the train were relatively uniform.  There was some good scenery going over the Rockies, but after that it was often flat and white with snow.  There were an impressive number of frozen lakes that we passed in Manitoba and Ontario.

It was interesting changing crews.  I thought that the most glaring difference was in the food.  The chef from our first leg was much more into the aesthetics of food preparation, and the next chef was much more into being sure there was enough food on our plates.  The food was OK.  I suspect that they got the desserts in bulk from some bakery or other, but they were all premium quality.

Here is Kristi in Jasper, BC.  We stopped there for an hour, bought a few things and didn't understand that you couldn't get back on the train until they were ready for you.  No big deal.  We got back on the train and only waited in the Jasper waiting room for about a half hour or so.

 I'm not sure whether I need to mention what day it is, but perhaps just to remind myself.  It's only the second day on this self indulgent journey.  I am only starting my day so don't know exactly what is going to transpire, although we do have a plan.  At any rate we are following the path of the rail journey planner who has us visiting a city iconic tower, but really nothing else so we are going to seek out the city art gallery as well.  It's not 8am yet and we have until 2:30pm to kill.

I know that if I mention where I am to someone my age, they are going to regale me with their last journey to Paris, Rome, Florida etc.  I have heard so many people now talk about their travels as though they were some kind of accomplishment.  The other side of that is travel because I earned the privilege.  I feel like I'm kind of alone in my assessment of travel as unnecessary indulgence.  There is no doubt that the way we are traveling now is a product of capitalism and I think, not much else.  It appeals to an emptiness that people seem to feel in their everyday lives, scratches an itch as it were.  This definitely is not luxury travel at this point.  I'll have more to say about this later.

 We are in Canada.  Vancouver to be more specific.  We took an Amtrak from Seattle this morning.  We were awakened at 4am by our friend, David Gilmour who is traveling with us.  It was when we were going to get up anyway . . . well . . . the alarm was set for 4:15am.  We wanted plenty of time to be ready for the 5:30am Uber.  That was so we could catch the 6am Sounder to Seattle, which we did.  Our Uber driver was an immigrant from Uganda, and David had a nice chat with him about his home country.

Riding on a train is a perfunctory process.  You buy a ticket, and climb onboard.  Assuming you got on the right train you simply sit until your destination is announced and you jump off the train.  You may, or may not fraternize with the other passengers.  On the way to Seattle David and I struck up a conversation with a young lady who had an electric unicycle.  She, as it turned out, was from Maple Valley and used her unicycle to get to and from the train station to her workplace and back again.  I think that's all we need to know, but she was nice to talk to.  I gave her one of our cards, and maybe we'll see her again.  Who knows?

If you could get close enough to this sign to read it, our train is 516, and we left King Street Station around 8am.  It was a trip down memory lane to ride the train along the shores of Puget Sound through places I had been at early stages in my life.

If you could read the sign it would say that we were leaving at 8:30am and stopping in:  Edmonds, Everett, Stanwood, Mt. Vernon, Bellingham and finally arriving at our destination, Vancouver, British Columbia.  It gave me a small amount of pause for thought as we went across the Stillaguamish River near where my great grandfather was killed in a train accident late in the 19th century, a story my mother had told me - once, and never again.  It's a story I've told many times as I wrote a song inspired by the story.  We stopped in Stanwood where I ran a pea viner in the summer, and later drove a silage truck.  I loved driving that 1949 truck with an air horn no less!

We filled out forms at King Street Station for the Canada customs.  It was easy, and the customs were too busy to worry about us, their process being pretty perfunctory.

The ride was uneventful, other than provoking memories in me.  We are at a hotel in Vancouver, and have some time tomorrow to be tourists a bit.  It's a big city and every time we are here the city reveals itself a little bit more.  There are some memories lurking round corners here too.  It will be good to be off in the Canadian landscape to places I've never been before, and some that we have been to before as well.  I don't think I'm a very good traveler.  I just go un curiously through the landscapes waiting until later when I'll ask myself why I didn't pay more attention.

Maybe I'll have a bit more time a little later to finish this.  In the meantime it looks like we are going out on the town for a bit.  Until then . . . 

We went out for a fairly long walk tonight culminating in dinner at a ramen restaurant, Jinya Ramen Bar.  It was a surprisingly nice restaurant, very good environment and I had a nice spicy meal, not entirely different from Vietnamese pho.  We are thinking about tomorrow.  We'll leave our luggage at the hotel after we check out and go be tourists for a while before we catch our train.  

I suspect I'll have more time tomorrow to tell you how things are going.  Really though,

it is not all that exciting . . . so far.

It's Sunday, February 16th, 2025.  We are preparing to make a journey across the continent and back via rail, first through Canada, and return from NYC to Seattle via Amtrak.  We'll be traveling with our friend, David Gilmour.  

I think we can anticipate going through a lot of snowy conditions at this time of year, but weather has become increasingly unpredictable with global climate change and all.  Interestingly enough, our latest national administration has declared that global climate change is a myth and not to be taken seriously.   It's bound to be interesting to watch the economy fall as we spend two weeks being oblivious to what is going on.  Canadian news was always too detailed and as a consequence too boring to watch an entire broadcast.  I've got to remember to bring my transistor radio with me.

We already spent the money, so it is a given that we are going.  We've been examining logistics of getting to the train station.  We'll be taking the "Sounder" to Seattle and hooking up with our rail that will take us across the continent.  I suppose I should just be glad I'm not doing it on horseback, or taking care of oxen that are pulling a wagon, or (like Lewis and Clark) walking across the continent.  Keep watch here.  Well, I haven't even decided if I have enough room in my luggage for this computer yet, but I want to bring it with me.  It really is a lot easier to type a blog than to write it by hand in a notebook, but I'll probably be doing both.  Let's just hope I don't bore you all to tears.  More than that, let's all hope I don't bore myself to tears.  Thanks for listening.  Steve N

Night Driving in the Twenty-First Century

     First of all I’ve never had to wait for a paper tablet to open.  I could just simply take out my pen and start writing.  On the other hand this is much more legible than my handwriting as anyone who as ever received a handwritten letter from me will attest.  Here I am wasting more time on writing about the computer instead of just getting to it.

     Last night and into this morning we drove back from Cle Elum.  The roads were bare and dry (as they say on the pass reports), and travel was somewhat unremarkable.  That is, the same or similar to what the experience has been in the past.  On the third hand (the other other hand) it occurred to me at some point that being in a vehicle moving at 70mph through a pitch black night over a mountain pass could be considered remarkable.  How scary would that experience be for someone who had never experienced anything like it? 

     We finished work early.  I think it was around 11:30 pm that I picked Kristi up from the front of the club in the dark, the cold with only the lights from the building illuminating the Cle Elum street.  She had locked the back door of the club that we loaded in from, returned the keys to the bartender, and come around to the front where I had driven our car loaded with our gear.

     We drove out to the Cle Elum main drag and slowly left town.  I’ve had experiences with the local gendarmes late at night there and know that one must drive the speed limit (25 mph) or risk a ticket, and probably some humiliation as they will assume that you have been drinking.  It was a low traffic night on I-90 and I hit the gas and very quickly we were moving at 75 mph through the wintry night.  I asked Kristi to get me a piece of “tortarustica”, which she did and I had a bite to eat.  After the tortarustica she gave me a “carmelita”, then another carmelita (dessert bars).  Tortarustica is a pastry filled with sausage, and spinach plus other stuff.  I don’t know exactly what the ingredients are, but it’s a hearty meal, and excellent served cold in an automobile speeding through the black Cascade Mountain night. 

     I-90 is changing.  I guess it always has been changing.  The mountains are unforgiving and drop tons of snow on the roads over the passes, and sometimes tons of rock as well.  We had a conversation with a retired snowplow driver who had been buried in the snow a couple of times.  He was in his snowplow and was dug out soon enough, but it was interesting talking to someone whose professional life was dealing with the snow, rocks, and weather of Snoqualmie Pass. 

      On this particular night it was freezing, and that led to thoughts of ice on the road.  I even thought I saw a couple of snowflakes, but there was no serious snow during our drive.  You follow your headlights through the dark.  You follow the white lines on the road.  You turn on your brights when there are no other vehicles ahead of you, then you dim them again, watching the road disappear in front of you when the lights go back to dim.  I don’t know how much of the driving is intuition, but there has to be some.  I can remember nights when it was white knuckles all the way through the snow, ice, cars sideways in the road, or in the ditch hoping you would not join those “losers”.  You see familiar landmarks and note your perceived distance from the top of the pass but last night it was all topsy turvy as the landmarks are not the same after the most recent road construction.

      There are signs about the road construction – “left lane closed ahead”, “construction zone”, “slow”, and now in the 21^st century they have digital readouts over the road in several places that give you the varying speed limits.  You slow down, but they very seldom tell you that the construction zone is over and you can speed up again.  I didn’t see cop one for the entire trip.  I guess they were all in the little cafes along the route eating donuts and drinking coffee waiting for their shift to end.

     I’ve always thought that it was somewhat of a miracle that we have never been in a serious wreck.  We haven’t even been in spinouts, or sliding sideways incidents very much, and those that did happen happened at very slow speeds.  We have driven many, many miles through serious blizzards, across roads that were covered in ice and so slippery that you could barely stand on the ice if you were to find yourself outside your vehicle in the black ice night.  We have seen roads washed out so there was only one lane, landslides requiring detours, roads with the flood waters up against the edge of the surface we were driving on.  I wonder when a tie rod will break, or a tire blowout, or a tree fall from the side of the road, a particularly severe wind will send us sliding out of control down a bank, rolling into and icy river or off of a precipice ending in a ball of fire on the rocks below. 

     Before we were even packed up Kristi was telling me that she was wide awake and could drive.  I drive faster than she does, so when I can I try to do the driving.  Also, I fall asleep in the car and Kristi is an excellent co pilot as she is always awake.  Certainly that is part of the reason that we haven’t been involved in a major car crash.  Many times I’ve had her caution me to look out and had my fat pulled from the proverbial fire.  I only wish she didn’t alarm me with such an intense sense of alarm, although I suppose it is justified considering what the price of no alarm at all might be.

    One more thing . . . we played very well last night and given that we do not work as often as we used to, it was very satisfying.