Amtrak Adventure 2004 part 4

Have I mentioned how much I love eating with strangers? Yes, I guess I have. I just got back from lunch with my car mates Eddie and Yuka and a woman who got the activist in me talking again. Her name was Katrine and until about six months ago lived in a small town outside Mexico City. Turns out she dreamed of living in Italy, and ended up in Minneapolis. She met the man who would become her husband while he was working as a consultant on a job in Mexico City. She was on her way to meet him in Lake Tahoe where she's hoping to learn how to snowboard during a nice week long vacation.

We started talking about travel and Eddie and Yuka got to hear my philosophy again about how traveling makes people better citizens of the world. Katrine spent five months in one of my favorite cities in the world, Florence, so we were off to a good conversational start. We talked about NAFTA and now that it's ten years old, how it's not really working for anyone unless you happen to be the CEO of a large corporation. A friend of hers was in Miami protesting the World Train Organization meeting there a few months ago. So we talked about immigration and trade between Mexico and the US and workers benefits and how WalMart, by selling sweatshirts for a dollar was really contributing to the problem, and it was just a great talk.

Then we talked more about travling. When I told her the only place in Mexico I'd visited was Cozumel to scuba dive, she told me that scuba diving was her favorite thing to do. So we were able to talk about the beautiful water in Cozumel and the great shelf drop off there. It's the most amazing thing. You're swimming along in about 90 feet of water and you come to a cliff. If you keep going out over the edge, you can just feel the temperature drop and the ocean bottom just disappears. The water is so clear there that you can see forever, but the shelf drops off so much, it's just too far to see down. She hadn't been night diving, which I was fortunate enough to try, so I was able to tell her about that as well. Well, it was a great lunch and poor Eddie and Yuka were left to listen to us yammering.

Well, we're about four hours behind schedule now. This time it was because of the conductor's union. Apparently conductors, by law, can only work 12 hours straight. Must be nice. So because we were so far behind schedule, they hit their twelve hour limit one stop early. What that means that we have fresh conductors waiting for us in Sparks Nevada, and conductors that aren't allowed to work any more with us at the station in Winnemucca Nevada, 200 miles east of Sparks. Seems like the best thing to do would be to have the conductors take a nice comfy seat, put their feet up and call it a day while we continue on to Sparks, right? Apparently not. No, we sat in Winnemucca while the fresh, legal conductors were DRIVEN by car, 200 miles to us in Winnemucca. Whatever.

Issac continues to take care of me however, finding a working AC outlet for me in an empty room when I need to charge my laptop battery when it gets low, so I can continue to write and work on my photography. My iPod is just about out of battery life though, so I'll have to plug that in soon and give it a little charge.

Ah, we're heading up into the real mountains now. We've made it to California, home of Governor Arnold and the Sierra Nevada mountains. Time to pull the camera out again. I knew I should have wiped off my window at that last stop! Oh well, that's what Photoshop is for.



Okay, that was beautiful! Sometimes things have a way of working out. Sure we're late, now five hours, but that means rather than doing through Donners Pass at noon, we went though as the sun was beginning to set. What light! And the moon was out too! And man, did it snow here. There is a crazy amount of snow on the ground and making the pine trees branches sag under the weight. I'll see if I have enough battery power to send one more picture through before arriving in San Francisco.

It's funny, I've managed to barely make it through the trip without running out of power on everything. My phone is getting low and probably will only be able to connect to the internet one more time before giving out, my digital camera probably has about ten more images before it will need a recharge. I've managed to play my iPod sparingly enough today to leave enough for tunes during the last leg of the trip.

Ordinarily, none of this would be a problem, but they never managed to get my AC outlet fixed after it stopped working on Saturday. But Issac has done a great job of getting my computer charged up every few hours, leapfrogging from room to room in our car whenever one became vacant for a few hours.

I had a chance to speak with him for a little while during one of our waits. He's been doing this for 25 years and he's been on quite a few of Amtrak's lines. He's been on the California Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco since June of this year. Before that he was on the Southwest Chief from Chicago to San Antonio Texas, and before that, on the Empire Builder which goes from Chicago up through Glacier National Park and through to Portland and Seattle. He said as many times as he passed by Glacier Park, he never got tired of looking at it. That train has been on my list before. I think I'll have to make sure I do it soon.

He even cracked open one of the lower door windows for me to take a few photographs sans filthy scuffed up glass. I'm going to be doing a lot of work in Photoshop on the others to get rid of the unwanted window dirt.

Hey, they're going to feed us again! What a bonus. Dinner in 10 minutes. One more chance to meet some new people.


It was a "whatsever left in the kitchen dinner" and whatsever left was a nice t-bone steak for me. I sat with three people who were big national monument/park visitors. But real serious about it, like taking small tours with Native Americans as guides to places the general public seldom gets to see.

And I'd have to say that for being a guy who until recently was really only interested in traveling abroad, there are some pretty cool places to see right here in the states. My trip last year to Yosemite was a real eye opener in that regard. So amazing in scale that even when you're there you can't appreciate how big everything is, because there is simply no reference point in scale. Quite remarkable and I can't believe it took me so long to discover it.

Well, the trip is almost over... at least the westbound part of it. I'm looking forward to a nice time in San Francisco followed by another great train trip home on the other side of it. I'm not sure if I'll be writing for the Chicago Tribune on this trip or not, but if it happens again, I'll let you know, you kind friends who have been doing a lot of reading if you've gotten this far. Thanks for going on the journey with me and I'll post more photographs when I get a few moments, and more importantly, a working AC outlet.

Nearly to Sacramento, 53 hours into the trip.

Amtrak Adventure 2004 part 3... Pop Quiz!

Okay kids! Time for a rail adventure quiz! What's the worst sensation to have when you wake up on a train heading from Chicago to San Francisco?

Motion sickness? Nope. Dehydration from the high altitudes? Nope. Give up?

It's stillness. By that I mean no motion it all. You wake up from a sound sleep and realize you're not getting tossed around in your little bed. You also realize that you're not getting any closer to you destination. You have no idea how long the train has been sitting there. And you have no idea where you are. You look out the window and it's pitch black. Maybe a tiny blinking light way, way off near the horizon, but other than that, no reference point of any kind.

That's how I woke up this morning. It was 5am, a little earlier than I wanted to get up, but not too bad. It would give me a little time to head down to the restroom, wash up and get dressed before anyone else started moving on the train. Makes you first in line for breakfast when the dining car opens at 6:30. Not bad.

So I washed up, threw some clothes on and turned all the lights back off in my room to let my eyes get accustomed to the darkness again, thinking maybe I could see something that might give me a clue. I was pretty sure we had made it as far as Salt Lake City, Utah somewhere around 1:30am since Al and Nata, my dinner companions from the first night were missing from their room and that was their stop.

There should have been a stop in Nevada by this time, though. It's too bad that the states aren't red and blue like they are on TV during the elections results. Isn't Dick Cheney from Utah? Definitely a red state. And then Nevada is blue, right? Any state with Las Vegas in it can't be a red state. Half naked showgirls? C'mon! I knew I should have paid more attention to the big board on election night.

Of course the ground is covered with snow anyway, so I don't know if I could make out blue or red even if the states were the color of their political leanings. But I was hoping we had made it to what I thought would be a blue state anyway. That means we wouldn't be too far behind schedule.

5:30.... 6:00... still sitting there. I was beginning to worry that we might be experiencing another major delay like the fourteen hour delay the California Zephyr had experienced a few days earlier because of a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Let's see, if we were delayed fourteen hours, that would put me in San Francisco about 8am Monday morning. More or less on time for the first day of Macworld, but probably a little groggy. I would miss the dinner plans I had made with friends for Sunday evening unfortunately, but at least I would be there.

In the darkness, I started to wonder if it would be even longer. I really wanted to be in San Francisco by early Tuesday morning. You see, Apple nerds, and I'm counting myself as one of them, flock to San Francisco every January, much like the seals to Pier 39, to see our exalted leader tell us how our lives or going to be even more kick ass in the coming year. Steve Jobs, or The Steve, as I like to call him, gives a keynote address Tuesday morning and I have a press pass to get in this year, which would put me right up in front of the huddled masses, yearning to be free from the bland non-Mac world. Really, you'd think the Beatles had posthumously re-formed from the excitement in San Francisco the day The Steve speaks to us.

But as I sat in my darkened room on the motionless train, I grew concerned that the huddled masses might hear the words of The Steve without me... until... LURCH! The train began to move... slowly, but with each second we were closer to San Francisco than the second before.

At 6:28, I headed toward the dining car, where I might find some answers to exactly where we were in addition to a delicious breakfast. The dining car captain sat me at a table and within a minute, a group of ladies came in and were seated across the aisle, after a rather involved debate concerning who should have the inner seat because one of them was left-handed.

They too were trying to figure out where we all were and asked the dining car captain if he had any information. All he could tell us was that we were delayed in the night by a frozen switch and he really didn't know exactly where we were. Hmmm. Well, that was better news than being delayed due to an avalanche near Donners Pass.

And I only bring up avalanche because when we passed through Denver and we all got morning papers, they said the snow was heavy enough for the avalanche warning to be "high." So now we have a high avalanche condition to go along with our lovely Condition Orange or Burnt Siena or whatever the terror condition is these days. It's a wonder we all get out of bed in the morning with all of our government provided daily frightening allotment, paid for with your tax dollars, I should remind you.

A nice couple about my age from Reno joined me at my table and the three of us, with my own sharply honed knowledge of western land formations and their much more useful local awareness, tried to figure out where we were as the sun started to peek up over the distant mountain range. The first question to be answered was, were we still in Utah or had we crossed over into Nevada? If I could have found a little cell phone service, I could have found our location on my fancy phone. But ironically, when you're as far away from civilization as we were, this useful technological feature doesn't work, just when you need it most. Oh well.

We were all hoping we had passed magnificent Elko Nevada which we should have made a stop at around 4am. That would mean we would be coming up on breathtaking Winnemucca Nevada any time. Of course, if we hadn't made it to lovely and scenic Elko, we were at least three hours behind schedule, maybe more.

My delicious french toast (NOT freedom toast) arrived just as information was making it's way through the dining car that we were indeed approaching the majestic and beautiful Elko Nevada. Oh, I kid. There's not even a station in Elko. Just a length of chain-link fence that the passengers stand next to for, in this case, hours. It's right next to Western Nevada Plumbing Supply. You can't miss it.

So there it was. We were about three and a half hours late. As my Reno friends let out a disappointed sigh, I quickly pointed out that at least it was a fourteen hour delay. My belly was getting full of yummy french toast and I was optimistic. Plus, I knew I would get to see The Steve on Tuesday.

That is until an announcement came over the train's intercom confirming for us that yes, we were three hours and fifteen minutes behind schedule, followed by a list of ETAs for the remaining stops. Okay, I thought. Not bad. "Unless," the announcement continued, "the two areas of broken rails we were heading toward were not fixed by the time we got there. At which point there would be further delays."

The overhead camera looking down at me pulled up into the air through the ceiling of the dining car and up and up still pointing down at the shrinking train as I screamed into the dark morning sky, "THE STEEEEEEEEEEEEVE!" You, know... like in the movies... when Captain Kirk yells up toward the sky, "KAAAAAHHHHHHNNNN!" Okay, I didn't really yell that. But I've been on this train a while now, and your mind tends to get very imaginative this far into the trip.

But back to reality for a moment. A three or four hour delay is really not that bad when you consider that the trip is supposed to take more than 50 hours. What is that, maybe eight percent late?" A drop in the bucket really. As long as they get those rails fixed. And it's Sunday, which means overtime for the rail workers who know they're going to have to start paying off their Christmas credit card bills, and so they're in a good mood to get the double-time and... well... I digress again.

I returned to my room and grabbed my laptop. After spending a bit of time on my room's circuit breaker last night, Issac wasn't able to get it working, so he let me charge it up in a nearby room that was empty for the moment. So I had no AC power, but at least I had a fully charged computer battery. A few clicks on the Energy Saver controls on the computer and I'd managed to double the battery time to almost four hours. Not bad. But I'll probably scrimp a little and only include one image in this journal entry to conserve power.

As I discovered on last year's Amtrak journey, one of my favorite experiences on board is eating with strangers at my table. I know that sounds a little weird, and I'll admit, I'd probably not go for it back in Chicago, but on the train, it's a great way to pass the time. You'll remember that's how Cary Grant met Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest.

"I'm a big girl now," she tells him after shrugging off the knowledge that he's a fugitive from justice.
"Yes," he responds in his characteristic rhythm, "and in all the right places."

At lunch yesterday, I finally got a chance to really meet my Asian neighbors from across the sleeping car aisle. Their English was pretty entry level, but enough to have a limited exchange. Eddie and Yuka were traveling from New York to San Francisco by train and clearly were enjoying the sites. "Are those all.... cows?", Yuka asked pointing out the window. I told her yes. "Even the white ones?", as she pointed at the tan ones. Yep, even the white ones.

I told them I thought they were very brave to be taking a cross country trip and learning how to speak English along the way. Brave wasn't exactly the word I wanted, but I was looking for an easy word to describe the concept of traveling in a country that, in my opinion is still a little awkward about dealing with Asian people who don't speak english, even though Europeans who don't speak english are somehow considered charming and exotic. I said I thought everyone should travel to get a better idea of the world around them, because it's very easy to grow up in one city or one country and assume your way is the best way and everyone else is backward or strange.

And then, I just couldn't resist getting a little political and mentioning that it disappointed me that President Bush never really traveled outside the United States before becoming president, a fact that is apparently well known in other countries because Yuka agreed, adding he didn't even have a passport before the White House.

I said maybe we'd be able to vote him out of office this year, and they both nodded yes, and smiled. I'm not sure where in Asia they were from, because I'm too much of a round eye to know the subtle facial differences of eastern people, but as self appointed ambassador to anyone I meet from outside the US, I just like people to know that we don't all agree with the policies of the current administration. I just can't help myself.

Dinner turned out to be far less political. John and Amy were a couple from Sacramento, he a camera operator and she an accountant who had recently started their own film and video equipment rental business. They were traveling home after visiting Washington DC, New York and Chicago. John said he was never really comfortable in New York, preferring the cleaner and friendlier Chicago. They said they only spent a little time in Chicago, but really liked it and looked forward to a trip back, perhaps as part of a plan to visit all the major league ballparks.

...And we were off! I love talking about old ballparks and growing up loving baseball as a kid, and the three of us had a great time talking about owners and the new stadiums and minor league ball, because Sacramento has a Triple-A Oakland A's team there. Surprisingly, John was a White Sox fan along with being a Dodgers fan, and we shared a hero in Hall of Famer, Carlton Fisk.

Because of our industry connection, the conversation turned to great baseball films like Bull Durham, Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams. And we talked about new movie technology comparing High Definition Television to Film. I think we were genuinely sad to see the meal come to an end.

And now, as we continue the journey toward California, we have only the snow covered Sierra Nevada Mountains and some broken rails between us and the seals of Pier 39.

In the Nevada Foothills,
Billy

Amtrak Adventure 2004 part 2... Dinner with new friends

I always have to write these things down before I forget them. I had dinner tonight with an older couple named Al and Nata. They were on their last leg of a six week cross country rail excursion from their home in Idaho, down the west coast to LA, and across the country up to New England, down to Florida and back again.

It was a sort of retirement present for Al, who Nata told me hadn't been well as of late. He had been on oxygen until recently and they were working to get him off of it, which they finally did and this was a little reward. I have to give Al credit. He had to be in his 70s or 80s and it's not easy to make your way down the narrow aisles of a train speeding through the night at 80-100 miles an hour, jerking back and forth without warning. I guess I just take balance for granted.

Al and Nata are a few rooms down from me in my car, so I made sure they got to the dining car and back tonight. Moving between cars is a bit of a task when you're that old. I tried to make sure the automatic doors didn't trap them outside the train as they were moving from car to car. I guess I'd hope someone might keep an eye out on my mom and dad should they ever get the urge to travel. They're both younger and in much better shape than Al and Nata, but still. I know I get tossed around when I'm walking on the train.

They asked about me, what I did. I told them I edited television commercials and they both immediately told me how they hated that commercials were so loud compared to what they were watching. They said they mute the volume when they come on. That's a good example of the technology getting too smart for it's own good. It's true. They compress the audio in commercials so it sounds louder than everything else to get it to stand out. But I guess that doesn't work too well with Nata's hand on the mute button.

Al asked me about my ancestry. That's funny. I'm pretty sure it's been years since anyone has asked me that. I told him I was a UK mutt. Mostly Irish, but a little English, Welsh, maybe some German and Scottish too if I'm not mistaken. He said it looked good on me.

I think Nata said Al was in the Navy or on a base or something like that. They said they were stationed in San Francisco during the war. I'm sure they meant World War II. They said they used to take their kids down to the ocean and watch the submarine nets open and close. Definitely sounds like WWII to me. The three of us had the Evening Special for dinner tonight, which was pretty much a holiday meal of carved turkey, stuffing, vegetables and cranberry sauce. And Al insisted we all have pumpkin pie. Now am I one to argue with Al? Sir, no sir.

Almost time to turn my comfy sitting room into a bedroom. When I wake up, I'll be in Colorado.


Of course you have to sleep to wake up anywhere. Wow, that was a pretty bad night's sleep. Lots of voices in my head last night. I guess they've all been waiting for a quiet moment. I did eventually catch a few hours, and I guess that's one of the benefits of chasing the time zones on a trip like this. You pick up an hour every night.

I always look forward to breakfast when I'm traveling. I think it's because I really never have a proper breakfast except when I'm on the road. And unlike at home, I was up before 6am this morning getting dressed and ready for the day. Breakfast starts at 6:30 in the dining car and there were already a few people scattered in the booths when I got there.

I sat with a couple from Colorado this morning. They were on their way back from a mini vacation in Chicago, and as we sat in the darkness we could start to make out the snow covered outlines of our new morning surroundings. Lots of white out there. Was it still snowing? My pancakes would arrive before I could answer that question. Yes, still snowing and there was a lot of it.

It was hard to tell if it was a blizzard or just the snow being picked up by the train and blown past the windows. It was just white and every once in a while you could make out a tree or a building. When I got back to my lower level room, it was even worse. Pretty much just white.

As we pulled into Denver the snow stopped falling, but there was a lot of it. Denver is one of the few times you get to get off the train and stretch your legs for a little while. The station is literally right behind the ballpark that the Colorado Rockies play baseball in. Every time I pass though here I try to figure out a way to take a nice picture of the ballpark, but from the back, it's just another new stadium. Not really much character. Now taking a photograph of the back of Wrigley Field. Plenty of character.

We're beginning our ascent into the Rocky Mountains and this is where the trip starts to get interesting. I think we're about an hour and a half behind schedule so far. Don't know if we can make it up now that we're in the mountains. The flatlands of Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska just can't compare with the seismic upheaval of a giant mountain range. And painted with a fresh coat of snow and lingering heavy cloud cover, it's quite a scene outside my window.

One thing I really like about having a digital camera on this trip is that I really don't worry about how much film I'm shooting... well... because there's no film. If my smart cards get full, I just download them to my laptop and I'm set to shoot some more. The last trip through here, I was lucky enough to have been offered Mark Johnson's little Nikon Coolpix. It wasn't the newest camera on the block at the time, maybe a few years old, but man, was it nice to be able to experiment and shoot as much as I could and get instant feedback on how I was doing. It was the film time I had ever made photographs without film. And that little camera took some very nice pictures.

This time, having thoroughly been bitten by the digital bug I'm armed with a Nikon digital SRL, basically a nice big 35mm camera that doesn't take film. I'll be able to take pictures that are a little sharper and that I can blow up a little larger this time, so it will be interesting to see how I do.



We're passing through the 6 mile long Moffet Tunnel now, so I've gone from a white winter wonderland to pitch black. As my keyboard lights up in the darkness (thanks Apple designers), I take a quick look at my battery indicator and I see that although I am plugged into the AC outlet in my room here, there doesn't seem to be any juice making it to my computer. Hmmm. This could be bad. Nope the cell phone isn't getting a charge either. Wonder what's up? Well this may be my last entry for a while until I figure this out, but at least I had time to bring a few photos in and shrink them down to web-friendly size.



Passing through the Continental Divide,
Billy

Amtrak Adventure 2004 part 1... NPR Foreshadowing

This morning I woke up to the sound of NPR on my clock radio and I smiled the kind of smile you do when you know it's going to be a good day. Between snoozing and waking I heard about delays and flights being canceled at O'Hare and Midway due to the heavy fog. "Fog never stopped a train," I thought to myself and smiled even more as I hugged the pillow even closer. As I lay there, listening to the latest about the suicide bombers in Iraq, a more domestic story caught my half asleep ear. The California Zephyr train that had been trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for 14 hours in a huge blizzard had finally made it through and was finishing it's journey to California from Chicago.

Now I always thought that National Public Radio spoke to me in ways that the more mainstream news did not, but that was spooky. In a few hours, I would be heading downtown to Union Station to get on that very train to follow the Zephyr from two days before into the same snow covered mountains. Sometimes it's not nice to smile at the misfortunes of the poor air travelers.

For some reason I called up a Denver NPR radio station on the internet and listened for a few minutes. I knew I would wake up tomorrow in Denver and thought I might see what frequency it was in case I wanted to listen to my usual morning show. When the weather came on, I had to laugh. Not only was I heading into the remains of a train stopping blizzard in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but the announcer said there was a snow advisory for the Colorado Rockies tonight that we're making our way toward. 12 to 18 inches. Could be an interesting trip.

Quite honestly though, that's the mindset you have to get into when traveling by train. Now that I was a bit more of an expert at train travel, I was ready for anything. Still though, I have to say that taking a quick 15 minute taxi ride from my apartment in Lincoln Park to Union Station downtown is pretty relaxing compared to the same taxi ride to O'Hare that can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half. I've been in one of those hour and a half cab rides to O'Hare, forever glancing at my watch, and wondering what I was going to do when I missed my plane.

Once again, my departure was as smooth and as easy as it could have been. The same mere one person in front of me when I checked my larger bag at the Amtrak baggage counter instead of playing the kick the luggage game all over the floor at O'Hare while weaving through an unending line of grumpy air travelers.

No metal detector, no shoes off, no ruining my film with an x-ray machine. Well, technically I don't have film with me on this trip because I'm shooting digital, but still. I didn't have to worry about my smart cards getting reformatted. So there. No it was just a little wait in the Metropolitan Lounge, and then a walk down the length of the train to my sleeping car. It's a long train. First the engine, then the baggage car, then my car, the first of two sleeper cars, then the dining car, the observation lounge, several coach cars and then the mail cars. It's a looooonng train. And we left on time. No sitting on the tarmac waiting for clearance.

My little room this time is on the lower level. Room 14. The last time I rode on the upper level, so it will be interesting to see if there is any difference in the ride, especially at night when I'm trying to sleep. Last time, it took me a night to get used to the rocking back and forth, but by the second night, I slept like a baby. Maybe on the lower level, there will be less rocking.

It's been gray and foggy all day, but as dusk begins to descend somewhere in western illinois, the fog has lifted and the clouds are thinning and I think we're on our way into a beautiful sunset. I can see the mist gently hanging above the fields as the temperature begins to change for the evening.

I was hoping I'd get my same sleeping car attendant from the trip out west last year, Jullius, but no such luck. However, Issac seems like another great guy and as is customary for me, I slipped him a twenty as he was explaining the functions of my room. Jullius took great care of me last year after I did that and I'm sure Issac will as well. All these older guys have been working these trains for years and you just get a sense of history when you ride with them.

It looks like my traveling companions on this trip are the same mix of young and old. Across from me are a young Asian couple probably in their early twenties. They spent the first half hour of the trip giggling. Their door is closed now, so I can't tell if it's not funny anymore, or if they are simply giggling behind the glass.

I think there is a family in the room in front of mine. Lots of coming and going from at least one of the kids. Maybe it's the same kid. I guess I don't blame him. For a kid, being stuck on a train for two and a half days seems like it'll be a million years before you get to California.

I put in my dinner reservation for 7:30 this evening. I always like to eat at that time on the train. They start serving dinner at five in the dining car, but I'm usually just not ready that early, even with the earlier to bed mode you get into when traveling by train. Sounds like some good choices for dinner tonight as well. The salmon dish sounded good.

Damn, I'm usually pretty good at not forgetting things on a trip like this, but this time I did. See I'm shooting digital this trip, but I wanted to mix a little of the real old with the brand new. One of the first methods of creating a photographic image was to use a box with a pinhole on one end of it and a piece of film or a photographic plate on the other. This week I bought a little pinhole cap that goes on the camera where the lens usually goes. It's funny because it makes the camera look like it's just the body without a lens, but there is the smallest little hole in the center of the cap. And because it's so small, you don't need a glass lens to focus the image on the film plane. You need to make longer exposure than usual because the amount of light coming into the camera is dramatically reduced, but it really makes an image. And the image has a sort of other world look about it as well. And speaking of other world, the pinhole cap is now sitting in another world, on my desk at home, because I was playing with it this morning and forgot to put it in my bag. Oh well. There are worse things I could have forgotten. I have the camera, the charger and the real lens, so I can still shoot and make very nice photographs. I was just looking forward to turning back the clock a little.

The sky has turned into a charcoal grey sketch. Long sweeping strokes of charcoal. Rather devoid of color. I've never really seen anything quite like it.

Away we go... Riding the California Zaphyr into the snow

It's funny preparing for a two and a half day train trip. This is the second time I've taken the train from Chicago to San Francisco and I always want to bring along a little something to work on. Last year it was editing. This year, following my self imposed focus on photography in 2004, I'm only bringing photography related work with me.

While I didn't get a chance to scan any recent work before I left. There does seem to be a lot of images that have never seen the light of day even though they have been converted to computer files. Those need to be edited and organized.

Then there is the website. That's the big one I hope to do a little work on this year. www.billysheahan.com has had many incarnations, and this latest one created in August 2002 was never really finished. The film editing side was ironically more or less finished because it was the one I was least looking forward to doing, so I did it first to get it out of the way. I fully intended to get back to the photography side to finish it, but as usual... things always get in the way.

So, for this trip I've loaded up on as many disks as I could that I've filled with various photography projects. Again, none of it is very recent, but much of it has never been seen. By the time we arrive in San Francisco, I hope to change that.

If we get stuck in any snowstorms, I'll try to photograph them. I actually managed to make some pretty good photographs from my sleeping car window on the last trip. I heard on the radio this morning that a California Zephyr train that left from Chicago a few days ago got trapped in a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and it was 14 hours before the train could get out. I also heard that there's a big snow storm heading in the Colorado Rocky Mountains tonight. Looks like we're headed right into it. Could be an adventure!

We're about an hour into the trip now, heading west toward California. Already getting dark outside the window. I have some new photography gear I'm looking forward to trying out on the trip, but it works best during long exposures. Not exactly suitable for 80mph train travel. I'll have to wait a bit before trying it. We usually slow down in the mountains and maybe I'll be able to try it out then.