Valentine's morning

The sun is just a hint of color off to my left. The cabin around me is quiet, hushed - even the snoring from three am is muted now. My seatmate's down in the bathroom, and my own teeth are still minty-fresh from my own little wake-up ablutions.

Six am, and I've still got twelve hours to go.

The seat's fairly comfortable, and it has more leg room than any airline seat I've seen, even in first class. Gives you a little more room to recline the seat, plus there's a footrest you can raise, just like a recliner in your living room.

I've been sleeping alot. Pull my black cloak up around me like a blanket, and the motion of the train puts me down like that. I'm regretting a few things - checking my suitcase is the least of it - the list is topped by forgetting to hit the grocery store for portable snacks, and bringing my own water and a pillow are vying for second place. I do have a pillow, but it's one of those tiny little airline pillows - not even big enough for one of my cats.

I've caught a few small glimpses of scenery in between my numerous naps. Some fields in Oregon, the sea, the Columbia River, a blanket of stars above us at about midnight last night. Orion was off to my right. Right now the fog is flirting with the landscape, obscuring all but the tops of the high tension wires and a few skeletal trees.

The train is not more than a dozen cars long, all double decker. The coach cars are in the back, separated from the sleepers in the front by the lounge car, the dining car, and the parlor car (off-limits to us coach peons). There are some seats on the bottom level of the coach car, but most of them are up here. The bathrooms and storage for big luggage are down a set of very narrow stairs.

In between my naps, I'm enjoying myself thoroughly.

Breakfast in California

We're passing the Sacremento River again - passing over where it meets the San Joaquin River. The fog's still flirting with the sun, obscuring the rusting forms of the Mothball fleet. I can remember passing them before on a sailing trip up the river when I was little. The most memorable part, of course, was when Mom and Dad plopped lifejackets on us, tied a rope around us, and Dru and I spent an hour or two jumping in the river and getting swept by the boat by the swift current.

I just spent a most enjoyable breakfast hour. We'd pulled into Sacremento, and I was feeling a little nauseous, so I got out for a few minutes, and once my stomach settled, it protested most vocally over the lack of dinner the night before. They had space in the dining car, so I trotted forward and was given a seat with a family of three.

Mom's a native Seattlite, and has just finished up her student teaching. After thirteen years as a paralegal, she was due for a change, she said. Her kids were sort of quiet, boy and a girl in their early teens - with the beautiful complexion that mulattos are gifted with. They were polite - perhaps a bit subdued by the early morning.

We ate and chatted, and I eavesdropped on this one table with a very vocal woman and her three elderly seatmates. She expounded on how Walmart was contributing to the carification of the US, among other topics, and when she walked away from the table to get off at Martinez, she had a Titanium Powerbook. Geek moment!

I'm glad I'll be returning in one of the sleeper cars - you get the meals for free, and I've looked at the prices - it's well worth it. I'm thinking about future trips - maybe a round around the US : Seattle to Chicago to DC to Florida to New Orleans to LA and back north. 8 nights on the train, and however long on stops in between, but it would be so worth it just to see everything and not need to worry about the driving.

Difficult reading

Some books are harder to read than others. Pratchett I can tear through in a couple of hours. Flint is such a joy to read that I don't even notice the passage of time at all. Black Hawk Down, on the other hand, is difficult.

The prose is tight, and easy to follow. At times, the narrative jumps, but it's easier to fit in all of the massive amounts of background information in the small chunks that Bouden presents.

It's the subject matter that bogs me down - not so much the dead and dying Americans, but the utterly impossible mire that was and is Somalia. The movie doesn't tell that half of it - that mindset that's trapped the Somali people in the third world.

It's people unable and unwilling to see to the heart of the matter.

I'm reminded of a journal entry written in either 8th or 9th grade. Our teacher had posed a question: one of those moral dilemas that required you to kill to survive. I was unwilling then to let another give their life for mine, but now I feel more selfish. It would be situational, as I always excuse myself when I'm faced with difficult hypotheticals, but it remains that while there are a fairly large number of people I'd kill for, there are a much smaller number for whom I'd die.

I think I lost my train of thought there.

Fuck up

An hour, at least, from Santa Barbara, and we're already an hour behind, but I start gathering my things anyway. I pull out the hotel info that I'd printed off a couple of days ago to get the phone number for the shuttle and...

I'm late, that's no big, I've got Dine's last name branded into my brain so I'm sure I could find her, but wait...

The shuttle will pick up from the new Goleta station. I made my reservations to Santa Barbara. So I haul out the timetable - yep, Santa Barbara. No Goleta on the Coast Starlighter.

There are, however, other California routes. So I check the brochure, and sure enough, there's a Goleta station just north of Santa Barbara. The Pacific Surfliner goes there, but not the Coast Starlighter. I feel so fucked. And of course, there's nothing to be done until I actually reach Santa Barbara and get more intel on the situation.

Edit: Hooray for Devon! I didn't have to wait another two hours for the Surfliner to come through! Yay!