July 25
I woke up in the middle of the night to thunderstorms and I got up and went outside to the porch and looked at the sky and the rain coming down and I tried to decide if I ought to put on my weather gear and go up there. I didn't know any stormwatchers in Lafayette, so I wasn't sure who I should call, and they looked like they were pretty light anyways.
But when I went back to the bedroom, I felt like I was avoiding my duty by not being flying, and I didn't fall asleep again until the storm had passed.
It was still kinda dark out when we got up and we didn't really have too much time to play in bed. He got dressed while I re-packed my saddlebags and he used the microwave to make us each a cup of coffee to help wake up.
When we got to the train station, he said he'd wait with me until I got on my train, and then he was going back home to get some more sleep. So we sat outside on one of the benches and he kind of dozed off—I guess the coffee didn't do the job—until a passing freight train with more boxes woke him up.
He was kind of jealous when my train arrived. He said that the locomotive was kind of ugly, and it looked like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be a freight locomotive or a passenger locomotive and had tried being both, but he liked the rest of it, and he said that he hadn't known that Amtrak wasn't operating out of Lafayette.
We kissed on the platform and then I got on the train and went upstairs to the dome so that I could have breakfast. I waved at him from up there as we left the station, and it was a little while before the waiter came but I didn't mind at all—the longer my breakfast took, the longer I could sit at the table.
I ordered a breakfast burrito and we were all the way in Monon before I'd finished it. Even though I'd had a bunch of meals on trains before, it was still strange to start eating in one city and not be finished until I was in another city.
I probably could have spent a little bit longer finishing my coffee, but it would have been rude to be keeping someone else from my table, so I got up and went downstairs to the seat in my car and watched the fields go by.
When the train started getting into Chicago, I was disappointed, because the view wasn't as good anymore. We crossed lots of roads and when I'd look at the cars waiting to go by, I wondered where they were going and what they thought of the train and whether or not any of them noticed me. I think it would be really easy to get lost in a big city like Chicago, 'cause so much of it that I passed by looked alike.
We finally dipped down into the trainshed, and the conductor thanked everyone as they got off the train and he helped people with their suitcases, too. He didn't get to help me, 'cause my saddlebags were securely strapped on.
I had six hours before the Amtrak train would take me back to Kalamazoo, so I left the station and flew back to the parks and started walking around until I saw a big building that was called the Shedd Aquarium.
That sounded like it would be a fun place to visit, so I went inside and paid the woman at the kiosk and she gave me a little brochure which said where all the exhibits were.
Well, the first place I went to was an exhibit about fish that lived in the Great Lakes, and that was really interesting. Most of the fish were pretty dull colors, but some of them were really pretty just the same. They had lots of tanks against the wall, a couple of smaller ones that you could go all the way around, and a big open tank in the center like the one in Seattle where you could pet sea-life. This one had barriers around the edge, so we probably weren't supposed to pet the fish.
Then I went to see a northern exhibit and that had penguins which are black-and-white birds that can't fly. They'd waddle around on land and then flop into the water and swim around for a little bit then climb back out and waddle around some more. They looked like they were kind of dumb, but it was fun to watch them. And they were pretty good swimmers—a lot better than me.
I was kind of running late on time, so I thought I could only see one more exhibit before I had to leave. Since I wanted to get the most in, I visited something called Waters of the World, which had fish from all over. I liked those—there were a lot of really bright ones that lived in corals or in the Amazon River, and there were some really weird ones, too. They had seahorses, and octopuses, and they also had a fish called Granddad, who was the oldest fish in any aquarium. They had gotten him in 1933, and had had him ever since.
He was kind of ugly.
I went by a really big tank on the way out, which had lots of fish and even sharks swimming around in it. One of the sharks liked to swim really close to the glass, and I saw a couple of people jump back as he came by, 'cause maybe they thought he was going to get them.
I wished I could have stayed longer, but I couldn't miss my train, so I flew back to the station and stopped at Au Bon Pain and got another vegetarian wrap, then I went down to the trainshed and waited for my train.
It backed in, and I went to get on but the conductor said that I had to wait because it wasn't ready yet. So I waited while a bunch of people with yellow carts got aboard it, and after a while they left and the conductor told me that they had been cleaning it and now it was ready and I could get onboard if I wanted to.
I picked a seat on the left side of the train, 'cause that side had the best overall view. Then I dozed off a little bit, until the train started to move.
We bumped and banged through all the tracks in the station and crept along the tracks, past all the sidings full of railcars. I looked out at them as we went by and wondered if maybe the train that I'd seen going north last night was here—there were lots of the railroad cars with the container-boxes on them, but they all looked kinda the same.
I couldn't imagine how humans managed to sort them all out. The railcars had numbers on them, and a lot of the boxes did, too, so I guess they must have just walked around until they found the one they wanted. If they'd been smart, they could have put numbers on the top and then somebody could just sit in a watch-tower and find them that way.
When we finally got through all the outskirts of Chicago, the train started to pick up speed. I think the engine driver was impatient, 'cause it actually pushed me back in my seat a little bit when he started to accelerate. And before too long, we were flying through the countryside.
Before, the cars I'd seen on the highway were going faster than us, but now we just rushed right past them.
I didn't know that we were in Kalamazoo until the train started slowing down by Western Michigan's campus, and then we went by Kalamazoo College and curved into downtown.
I waited my turn before I got off the train, and then took off from the train station to go to Meghan's apartment.
She was really happy to see me back, and she asked me how my weekend had been, so I told her all about it, and I was yawning before I was done, ‘cause I hadn’t slept very much last night. So Meghan insisted that I ought to lie down and get some sleep, and I kinda didn’t want to go to bed before she was ready, but I was almost asleep on her lap.
Meghan said that she wouldn’t be up much later, but she had some things that she had to finish before she could go to bed—she had some laundry downstairs I think she said—and so I got in bed and I told myself I was only going to doze, but I fell all the way asleep and I woke up a little bit when she got in bed and put her arm around me, and then I fell back asleep again.