This is a different kind of trip than what we did last summer. No longer do we have the luxury of packing everything we could conceivably need into the back of a Ford Ranger pick-up … everything we bring must be able to ride on our backs. That means we must travel light, even though our packs don’t feel light at all. It also means we are completely dependent on public transportation for getting around.
The La Crosse Amtrak station
Public transit was to be our mode from the minute we stepped out of our house in La Crosse … except that we missed the bus to the Amtrak station. Our train was running late, and the next bus could have gotten us there on time, but we called a cab just to be safe. Waiting for us at the station was Faith, our spiritual daughter and house-sitter. Her stated purpose for meeting us was to pass along some Dutch money she had left from her trip overseas, figuring we had more use for it than she did. We think she just wanted to say good-by one more time, and appreciate that she did.
Obbie and Rozie sit ready for the train to take them on the first leg of their adventure in Europe.
On the train ride to Chicago, we observed that it is much harder to sleep on the train (or plane, in the car, whatever) at the beginning of a trip than it is at the end. It has to do with the adrenaline coursing thru the veins from the excitement of a long-anticipated trip beginning, whereas at the end of a trip one is engaged in quiet reflection while in a state of exhaustion. Anyway, there wasn’t much sleeping on the train in spite of several days of sleep deprivation.
And why were we sleep deprived? We had been trying to deal with jet lag in advance. As most of you know, we are not morning people. Our flight to London was scheduled to arrive just after 10am, or 4am Wisconsin time. They say that one should allow one day to adjust for each hour of time change. So during the week before we left, we woke up an hour earlier each day. Our problem was that we couldn’t get ourselves to bed any earlier each night … we kept staying up past midnite. Our last wake-up call in La Crosse was at 6am, even though our final preparations kept us up past one the night before.
Our train arrived at 4:20 pm. Chicago felt like a different kind of place than it was the last time we were there. The 9/11 attacks on New York had changed the mood in large cities such as this. We had a room reserved on the north side, but we wanted to have dinner downtown before going there. Our hope was to store our packs in the lockers at the station. The lockers were shut down … they were probably afraid someone would put a bomb in one. Isabel, our favorite Redcap (Redcaps are the baggage handlers at Union Station. Tip them generously, and they can be saints … at least Isabel was) set us up with storage while we walked around the city. We found concrete barricades all over the place, especially surrounding the larger buildings and government buildings.
We ate at Berghoff’s, which serves touristy and overpriced German food. We enjoyed food, but there wasn’t enough of it. It turns out that we paid for the atmosphere.
After dinner, we did some last-minute shopping before retrieving our bags and catching the Red Line to our motel. The Lakeside Motel is kinda seedy, but a good value. We got to sleep at 10 in anticipation of a 5 am wake-up call.