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Published: December 5th 2010
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Pittsburgh Amtrak Station
Pittsburgh Amtrak Station Day 1: It was a Dark and Stormy Night....
My husband Jim drove me to the Pittsburgh Amtrak station in a rainstorm. I had, once again, misjudged my departure date, and I was already miserably sick with bronchitis, bursting into alarming whoops, especially when I tried to sleep or lie down. If it had been Myrtle Beach as usual this year, I'd have had the option to go down early when I felt the first signs coming on, but everything had been arranged for November 30th. So I stayed a few days longer than usual, and got sicker and sicker.
And this year we were heading north, driving all day in the wrong direction towards colder and colder weather, with 30-degree temperatures (Fahrenheit, and ten degrees F below my bronchitis trigger point). predicted for Chicago, the destination of the train I would catch in Pittsburgh.
We parked in a multi-story city parking garage, which had, surprisingly, an exterior lit up in stripes of pink and blue lights. My first thought was that it looked like a giant birthday cake. My second was that it looked like a casino.
Once there, we found out that we had
to walk most of the long way around the building -- outside, in the rain, with Jim carrying my luggage) to reach the station. As we were crossing the street just outside the station, the water bottles I had packed for hydration and medicine-taking (I take medicine, mostly herbal supplements, four times every day) came bouncing out of my luggage and rolled out into the intersection.
I went back and got them. Fortunately all the drivers at the intersection had seen what happened, or at least did not want to hit a woman bending over in the middle of the street, even if the light was turning. It helped that I was wearing a neon yellow tracksuit that made me look like a stoplight myself. (Yes, I'll be stuck with that tracksuit for three months, now, but it was warm and comfortable, and on a cold, rainy _day like November 30th, those two qualities were uppermost on my mind.)
A kind station agent checked my reservation number and issued my actual tickets -- both sets, the ones departing now and the return set to be used in March. I'm afraid the March tickets will be dreadfully grubby by the time I am able to present them for redemption. I must ask whether or not it is acceptable to fold them.
Jim got me settled into a chair with my luggage around me. This was, of course, the "train" configuration of my luggage. I was carrying on a brown duffel, which just squished down to Amtrak's limit of 28 inches, and a bright red L. L. Bean bag, nicknamed "the pizza bag" for its distressing resemblance to the bag carried by Domino's pizza deliverymen. I was checking a black rolling suitcase, which contained about a third of the stuff it would ultimately carry to New Zealand. The rest was all in the brown duffel, as was my fourth bag, a blue duffel, nearly worn out, which would be one of my airline carry-ons. (As I had two seats, I was entitled to two carry-ons. At least, that was going to be my argument at the gate.)
The fourth bag, the blue one, was at this point heavy as lead. It contained a hundred days' worth of what I judged to be my eleven most important medicines and supplements. It was just barely within my strength to carry it. Therefore I could not carry the brown duffel, which contained the blue duffel and two-thirds of my clothing, at all. I could drag it, if I had to. Luckily at Pittsburgh there were free luggage trolleys, and since we had arrived at 8:30 or so for a midnight departure, some of them were still available.
Snow was forecast, so Jim gave up the idea of waiting for my train. He left at 9 p.m.. If everything worked out, we wouldn't see each other again for 97 days. But then, as I kept reminding myself, if I had gone to Myrtle Beach, we wouldn't have seen more than a couple of weekends' worth of each other for about the same length of time.
The station was quiet and the others waiting for the train were pleasant enough. There was an Amish family right behind me, and as the evening progressed they were joined by another Amish family. The two groups talked together in Pennsylvania Deutsch, and I amused myself by guessing at the meaning of a word here and there.
At 10 p.m., the station agent announced that, because of flooding in West Virginia, the Capitol Limited would be late. He said that it was currently expected to arrive over an hour and a half late, at 1:38 a.m.
At midnight, the station agent announced that the Capitol Limited was currently expected to arrive over two hours late, at 2:10 a.m..
At 1:30 a.m., the station agent silently put up a sign that gave the revised arrival time as 2:25 a.m. The train did arrive more or less at that time, and we got on our way at 2:44 a.m., nearly three hours late.
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