The first thing I heard as I woke up this morning was my father, on the telephone with someone, discussing my escort to the Jacksonville train station that night. Mostly, he wanted to describe in great detail how armed he'd be, as the inmates of his acquaintance have spoken frequently about it as their 'home base.' When that was exhausted, he mentioned having to call in sick tonight to accompilsh all this -- he's a prison guard on swing shift; the inmates don't generally go home every night, but the younger guards are more likely to malinger on a weekend night. The alternative would be to send my brother and my father's fiancée with me, but he wasn't thrilled about that (see the gang problem, above).
I blearily opened both eyes and informed him that as soon as I was physically in the station, I'd be fine, providing a brief sketch of how many of New Orleans's Finest had been in their station -- although in retrospect, they were probably more interested in searching for Amusing Things, what with the dog and all, than Interesting Characters. Father countered that it wasn't inside he was worried about, but carjackers nearby. I demurred, and rolled over briefly.
As friends who have seen me of a morning can attest, though, breakfast is one of the surest routes to raising Lorrie's consciousness. Before he met my mother, Dad had been a breakfast chef at the Cleveland Marriott, and his fine attention to detail from that and related work hadn't diminished over the years. In fact, it is to him I attribute the attention to detail and joy of cooking that earn my living and brighten many of my weekends, as well. Mind you, I'm also happy to blame him for polyamorous tendencies (which I tempered with common sense and he didn't; he tomcatted about) and a deep religious nuttery streak (see yesterday for religious nuttery discussion). It's neither good nor bad, and I don't know how much environment factors in, but there you are. Regardless, a trait he had and I didn't enabled him to be self-aware enough to produce perfect fried eggs with no crust and purely white whites. The bacon was chewy, neither burnt nor greasy. The toast had been scraped, unfortunately, but at least he remembered I didn't like it burnt -- and I blame the toast not so much on his cooking but on his fiancée's desire to have everything too well-done.
They don't actually live together, you see. I'm not sure if it's to maintain appearances or alleviate temptation or what, but Dad has his own apartment, an efficiency one floor up and across the building from Debbie (the fiancée). However, he only sleeps there, keeping all his clothes, toiletries, and the like in Debbie's place -- including his work clothes.
No, wait, I know my father -- this is for appearances. He's never been one to duck temptation too enthusiastically. He and Debbie tell me they'll visit this summer, and at that point certain things may come to a head, or they may not. I'm still not sure what to do about it... but it'll probably be to hide nothing, announce nothing, and see if they're as polite and respectful of me under my roof as I was of them under theirs. If nothing else, my parents and other kin of blood taught me the value of hospitality, long before I ever saw a list of nine.
All the same, I might be well-advised to reserve a hotel room. Just in case. Is Prudence on that list?
Anyway, after a superbly delivered breakfast, Debbie ran off to some local Strawberry Festival. Yes, you Northeast and Midwestern folks, who live in lands with real seasons, I said strawberry festivals. We who live in balmier climes get them in earlier, while you poor schleps must await dearest May, gowned in pale green, to come a-dancing with her sister June of the darker hue -- well do I remember pick-your-own strawberry fields near Philadelphia, and the berry season there I know quite well, but that's another tale. She needed cash, and Lorrie the Traveller was relatively flush: I lent her $60 on the promise that it'd be back in my pocket before I boarded the train.
After that, and a few cartoons, I showered and dressed and pulled out Amtrak's National Timetable, also referred to as Lorrie's Bible for the Next Three Weeks. If Dad had so many concerns about Jacksonville, founded or no, I should at least look for an alternative. The Silver Star stopped in a little town called Palatka about an hour and a half before Jacksonville, but afterward didn't make another stop until Savannah, Georgia. I related this information, and it turned out that Palatka not only made Dad happy about a lack of gangs, but also was closer to Gainesville anyway. The only question was: would Amtrak be all right with that? I called: the bemused sales representative punted me to the North American Rail Pass Desk, where a more confident voice assured me that at worst I would need to speak to the conducotr and pay the difference in fare. Of course, I now had to be in Palatka two hours earlier than I'd needed to be in Jacksonville (hour and a half of travel time plus half an hour layover), but that was easily correctable, and now Dad didn't have to call in sick.
Next on the agenda was e-mail. For my peace of mind, too, I wanted to download the timetables for the rest of the trip to have around in addition to the Bible, and as I'd recently rebuilt my iBook, I needed a new copy of Acrobat Reader, too.
While skipping through the mail, it turned up that both of my remote webmistresses, Jenny Blain in the UK and Manny Olds near Washington, needed new accounts and password that I hadn't managed to create before I'd left California. Making the accounts was easy. Calling Manny, as she was my next hostess, and verbally telling her a password was easy.
How in Niflheim am I supposed to get a password to the United Kingdom?! I can hardly e-mail it, not plaintext, I'm not about to explain PGP encryption... I asked her to call. She refused. I asked for a phone number to call her. She countered with the number, yes, but also a better idea than I'd come up with.
There are many paths up the Tree of Cryptographic Life. The simplest to crack, down near the plaintext roots, are substitution ciphers: ones where you replace A with J and the like. Codes, on the other hand, replace words and phrases with values known only to the two end users, but require a pre-existing common code book! It was this, though, that Jenny suggested. I slapped my forehead for missing something so simple, but it wasn't a thing that would ordinarily occur to me. But what would we both have on our bookshelves...
Duh. Which volume to use was starkly obvious, although I won't name it specifically in an open forum. And it was something I could essentially guarantee she had around. Well, actually, I didn't technically have one of these on me, but I could call Mike...
Oops, no, still at dance class. How about Arlie? Yeah! I explained things to her (because she, too, would Obviously Have One of These) and had her mail Jenny on my behalf. There, that was successfully dealt with.
Some people, including Arlie, have expressed amazement at how much I can get done remotely, and that I'd be willing to do so while on vacation. It's simple, really: The Internet doesn't take lunch breaks. And the side domains I host aren't a job, they're a hobby (like this funky religion thing): poking at them calms me like tinkering with a car humors many others. Besides, it all came back to the dead server (backplot), and leaving loose ends on one of those makes me cranky. So, when t'ings is broke, I fix. When t'ings is not broke, time to tinker and make better.
Debbie was due back by two, and I really did want to say goodbye to her properly before I left, but I was fidgety. Mapquest claimed its usual ridiculously long travel time to a destination, but the road conditions were unknown, my reception on the train was unknown, and many things were in the air. I calmed down, and waited until all of five after two before dragging Mikey to lunch, and ATM, and Palatka.
Lunch was at Sonny's, a well-known and good-tasting barbecue chain with fingers all across Northern Florida. I'd eaten here with most of my immediate relations when I was in Starke last year for Mikey's high school graduation, and it's one of those little things that proves to you that the north of Florida, unlike the south of Florida, is actually in the Deep South, with Georgia and all the rest. If you ask for iced tea, the response is "Sweet tea or unsweetened?" For all y'all Yankees out there, they mean that 'sweet' part pretty strongly. Iced tea is, however, the national non-carbonated soft drink of the former Confederacy, and a frequent default option in many places -- for instance, lunch once on the Sunset Limited was preceded by the server coming around with glasses of iced tea before taking proper drink orders. It's like that. Aside from the tea, which is brewed by the five-gallon bucket at Sonny's, I had a lunch plate of three ribs, which I treated to their sweet sauce and a bowl of barbecue baked beans (also quite sweet). The ribs came with limpish crinkle cut fries and lackluster cole slaw: the real star was the meat with strong support from the beans. I devoured.
Mike used Debbie's card at the ATM to pay me my money back, and we were off to Palatka. Gainesville is approximately in the center of the Floridian peninsula, and Palatka is near to the ocean side, making it about an hour's drive to sea and train alike. After about fifteen minutes of saying "Palatka," though, we were deep into making wordplay of the name -- hence the title of today's installment, made from running two of these pastiches together.
Palatka is a poor town, at least near the tracks. However, these tracks were directly across a busy highway from the police station, and the platform was highly visible from many angles. It didn't feel bad so much as just poor, so I took it as 'yet another rural Southern town' and kept merely at Yellow Alert. By comparison, New York's Penn Station gets Red, and NYC subways at night are somewhere out in the Infrared. Engage full shields, captain! Suspicion at maximum! At Yellow, we keep an eye on approaching people and vehicles, and in no case does Lorrie ever try and look like a pigeon.
I've never been mugged, so this appears to have worked so far...
We were, nevertheless, an hour early from all my fidgeting. I proposed we try and find the sea so I could bring back the requested water. We tried, but all we found was a nuclear power plant. Okay, that would have water -- lots of warm clean water, fresh from the heat exchangers -- but I doubt Bear (who'd asked for it) would approve. You'd think it'd be easy to find the bloody ocean in Florida, but the damn Atlantic was being Difficult again. We circled back to the train station.
I've always lived somewhere near train tracks. One of the things that set off the triggers that shot me eastward was standing on the Union Pacific tracks and realizing: these could be followed all the way to Chicago. From Chicago, you could go anywhere in the continent. Anywhere, on one contiguous system.
It awed me, touched me in the way that thinking the same way about a road does (thank you, Professor Tolkien!). This here went to there and I'd never been there, so let's go!
Anyway, back to living near train tracks: one of those childhood rumors that gets batted about is that if you put a coin on the train tracks, you'll derail it. Well, that's obviously untrue, but you do get nifty smooshed money. Mike picked up three souvenir pennies by the side of the tracks, their engravings all stretched and askew from the terrific pressure of the trains' passage. Rather a bit neater-looking and less expensive than using the machines in tourist traps that do that for you for fifty cents or more, if you ask me.
My cell phone was signalless, but I could and did use the station pay phone to call up Amtrak and ask if the train were on time: it was. We waited some more, and heard a train coming -- half an hour early!
And it looked like an Amtrak!
We hurriedly grabbed all my bags from the car and, with my mumbled thanks to my own foresight in being early and certain way-weary wanderers towed them heroically to the platform.
But... the train wasn't slowing? It was going... on... by...?
Several oddly-configured cars whizzed past us, large boxcars with perforated sides: they provided the answer: this was Amtrak's Auto Train, which carries peoples' cars with stops in Virginia and Central Florida ... and exactly noplace else. Oh. Let's put the bags back in the car, stand down from a Silver Alert (er, trains are silver), go back to waiting.
Just before the Auto Train swept by, I'd realized I'd forgotten to take any pictures of my family! Oooooops... After the scare, I pulled out my camera for a station sign shot:
Mikey had volunteered to have his picture taken while lying down on the tracks, between the rails and parallel to them, but swiftly reconsidered after noticing how fast the Auto Train had come by and a remark from me about how many freights I'd noticed my previous trains passing over the course of a day. Besides, Mom'd kill us both. So, here's a picture of him sitting on a rail, which will have to suffice, and will reduce the penalty to a light maiming.
Okay, okay, I fib. Here's the one that's not the "so close up you can count his nose pores" shot.
By the way, ladies -- and I mean chromosomal and from-birth ladies, let's not hurt him too badly -- he's available. He's unfortunately a fundie religious nutter, but I'd be very interested in anyone who'd like to take him aside for a few days of ... re-education. This is a guy whose car has a Christ-fish (with the appropriate Greek letters in, no less) and bears a bumper sticker like this:
+ > I < Christ must increase and I must decrease (NB: The "+" is actually a cross.)
If any of that appeals, drop me a line; I'll get you in touch.
Anyway, it really was the appointed and scheduled time when the right train pulled into the station, number ninety-two, the Silver Star -- current and former Thelemites in the audience would snicker up their bell-shaped sleeves to find out that the southbound version was 93... but I'd be lying if I said that were so, as the southbound Star is merely 91 and there is no train ninety-three ("Ah ha!" say the more paranoid, although I'm not sure why they would say this).
The Silver Star is of the Viewliner fleet, Amtrak's rolling stock used on all long-haul routes east of Chicago, save the Sunset Limited. They are uni-level, instead of bi-level like the Superliner of the west. They appear to be older, with a recent overhault. Viewliners also ride higher and are, I think, a touch wider. Bunks in standard compartments are of a size with those in Superliners, with the only important difference being that the top bunk is horizontal to the ceiling at all times, and merely lowers into position, whereas the Superliner top bunk levers into position.
The real difference between Viewliner and Superliner sleeper compartments is in the rest of the compartment -- in a Superliner, there isn't an appreciable 'rest of the compartment, just eight to twelve inches for a set of steps on one end and an open-air closet on the other. On a Viewliner, there's an extra foot, and it's put to some very interesting uses...
| Amtrak Transformers... | More Than Meets the Eye! |
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The left view isn't a big deal. Okay, so we have two outlets and not one, we have wider steps, whatever.
Dig the right-hand view. It's a private potty party in here: the bottom becomes a toilet, and a sink falls out of the wall with a third faucet for extra-cold water. And this, I remind you, is Standard. The shower's still at the end of the train, unfortunately, but you can't win 'em all.
Other amenities include more lights and light control panels (each seat has a set), and an entertainment system like an airplane's: several pre-programmed musical selections and a couple video loops that show on a small laptop-style flat screen. The intercar vestibules are wider (as the cars are wider) and less precipitous-looking as you slip between cars (probably a function of being unilevel).
Unfortunately, all this room in cabins means that the hallways are even more claustrophobically narrow. The higher floor of the cars means that getting in and out is even more exciting in a station without raised platforms. Still, I think it's worth it: one spends little time in corridors, right?
Another big drawback is that, while there's again no significant stowage space in the standard compartments, unlike the Superliner fleet the Viewliners don't have any carryon stowage space: if it's much bigger than a backpack, or perhaps a garment bag, you'll want to check it, and Amtrak's checked luggage service is only available at the larger stations. The Viewliner fleet isn't made to do hauls as long as those of the Superliner fleet, and once I got used to the Viewliner situation, I packed what I'd wear tomorrow into my backpack and had my suitcase checked to Washington once we pulled into Jacksonville.
When repacking my bags, I had to decide which clothes to wear tomorrow. Well, obviously the rune-ringed shirt from the last Æir's Feast; whoever's picking me up may not have seen me before, so it's good to be obvious. I also opened the black double-drawstringed bag that held my amber and fibulae (among other jewlery), and pulled out the Thor's hammer I'd just bought.
Now, I'd picked it up from a place online the week before, mainly because if I were going to be going forth and representing, I really ought to be flying the colors, and Thor's hammers tend to be politically neutral. The primary purpose, networking with the new Troth hearth in Tampa, had been negated, but I figured it was only a nudge to get me to wear a hammer. Most of the trip it'd been either visible or under my shirt, although for safety's sake I'd taken it off entirely while with my father -- you may call this cowardly, I call it avoiding unnecessary strife. At least I can still talk to my parents, and it's not that I lie so much as the topic... doesn't come up.
Anyway, I had this hammer. I stopped by a beading store after it arrived and picked up some blue rattail cord and a few other fittings and tools to make a necklace out of it -- yes, I know, I have any number of professional jewelers I could whistle up, but I wanted to do this one myself. Once I got home, I spread the things out and went to work... then laid my eyes on something that gave me pause.
See, in the ebb and flow of my desk are many papers. One of them was the registration for the Ostara feast that would occur just over a week after my triumphant return. In the upper left of all such is a Thor's hammer, the well-known pattern with a raven's head involved.
... the same pattern I'd just bought. Oops -- now I know what women twitter about when two show up at the same party with the same dress. Oh, well... it still looks nice.
Dinner call -- 8:30 reservation, or about an hour out of Jacksonville and towards Savannah. I had the fish of the day, which was salmon, and the couple seated across from me, nice people from Lon gIland (novel use of the space is deliberate here, I assure you), had prime rib. I found the salmon competently prepared, but obviously seasoned for the mild palate (i.e., not much). But as Diana always says, "It's really hard to screw up salmon:" it was decent. Unlike the Sunset Limited's baked potato attempts, this one was fully cooked and not burnt, which was nice. The salad had been reduced to all iceberg lettuce and two pallid cherry tomatoes, but I think that's due to inadequate provisioning of the train in Miami: this train is not adequately provisioned for its service run. They were already out of dining car wine and our waiter was resourceful, but reduced to raiding the sample-size bottles of Gallo plonk from the lounge car. I sympathized with our waiter, who was really trying to make the best of a poor situation, and tipped him $5 -- it would've been 20-25% if I'd actually paid, but the service was good: just under poor conditions. This encouraged the other couple to tip more, naturally, hearing my reasoning and discovering my broader train travelling experience -- three thousand miles in a week makes a decent experience pool, right?
The music channel is burbling some jazz, and it's eleven PM, local time. I didn't get out in Savannah (it wasn't encouraged), and will sleep right through the Carolinas, to awaken in Virginia, probably around Richmond. I deliberately took an overnight train, though, once I saw the travel time: I arrive in Washington just after eleven AM, awake, refreshed, and ready to go, as opposed to how it might otherwise be if I'd spent the day travelling instead of the night.
That's one of the best things of taking the train, I think: you can fall asleep, and keep moving. You can eat, and never drop below freeway speed. Fall asleep in the mountains, wake up in verdant plain shading toward swamp: a total climactic shift. It won't be nearly so dramatic heading up the east coast, mostly because it's dark for most of the way, but also because you just trade one arboreal succession for another. In this time of year, though, that will be offset: in Florida the sun is bright and golden already, and the trees are in their summer leaves with their fruit blossoms incongruously hanging upon them. Wisteria twines and blooms, and everywhere the brooding beards of Spanish moss hang as drawn curtains to the dramatic staging of the Deep South.
Flee northward, and the seasons reverse themselves. A major storm, a nor'easter, pounded the Northeast and New England while I was being harried and hampered down the coast by California rain. There is yet snow, up there, and none would be surprised, at least not in Minnesota, if it fell even next month, when April's supposed to be piercing to the root with his sweet liquors, already. Washington was planned to be neither North nor South. It's climactically liminal (ah, another word brought to Lorrie's Working Vocabulary by Mistress Diana Listmaker), and it's my next stop. Au revoir!
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