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Travel Notes

I did some traveling last weekend, much of it by Amtrak. I was almost continually on one or another of two trains for 2 and a half days.

File:St Louis night expblend cropped.jpg

I had left what should have been plentiful room for down time in Chicago before making the connection between the one train and the other, but as it happened the Lake Shore Ltd was late getting into Union Station. I just had time for a quick lunch there Friday before looking for the gate for the Texas Eagle.

I ate that lunch at a small snack bar that has a blackboard with a trivia question on it along side the menu items.  The trivia question when I arrived was, "Who said, 'I will hear in Heaven.'?"

Those were, as you too might have guessed, the last words of Ludwig von Beethoven.  Unfortunately, you don't win any discount on the food by telling the waitress the right answer.

I also picked up a Wall Street Journal in Chicago and learned of the arrest by New York State authorities of Sergey Aleynikov.  So his stunning victory in the federal appeals court a half-year ago turns out not to be the end of his troubles.  There have been a heck of a lot of zigs and zags in his fortunes!

Anyway, the first step out of Chicago in Joliet. By this time I've noticed that the TexasEagle is a much more luxurious train that the Lake Shore Ltd., one on which it is easier to drop the seat back and drift off to sleep.

But at some point south of Joliet I get into conversation with a woman with a Ph.D. in economics. She sees some of the material I have with me on the train and asks if I'm an economist. I tell her no but add a bit about what I do and she tells me she's not only a (retired) economics professor, but that she wrote her doctoral thesis decades ago about public dissemination and understanding of economic ideas. Which is what I do. So we had a nice chat. She got off at St. Louis.

St Louis is where the train crosses the Mississippi, and you get a wonderful view of their famous memorial, the "Gateway to the West," as it does so. Alas! I had no camera. I couldn't even use my cell phone as a camera, it was out of power and I hadn't brought the charging equipment.

Ah, well, live and learn.


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