Mar on Nostr: Yesterday was a mixed bag. Folks, if you are in WA, be wiser (and more flexible) than ...
Yesterday was a mixed bag. Folks, if you are in WA, be wiser (and more flexible) than me and avoid things that have any potential to be crowded.
Family is in town and they enjoy doing long walks. But our town doesn't have any nature trails easily available and our car is too small to fit everyone.
There is, though, a nearby town that has one of our favorite trails. The trail is close enough to the bus station that we could send half the party by bus and then shuttle everyone by car to the trail in two groups. We sent my parents to the other town by bus, and the rest of us followed in the car.
Half way through, I remembered the bus service stops quite early on the weekends. If we tried to go to the trail, they would be stuck without a ride back. I'm not good at changing plans. So after some thinking I realized we could still do it if we did the return by train.
Trains are awesome, do we agree here?
The kids also love trains, so I booked tickets for my parents, the kids, and me. Husband would drive the car back.
We spent the day out in relative quiet and all was looking good. The train station closes early in the weekends, so we waited at a very large platform, with maybe five or so other people. And we waited. The train was quite late, and when it finally came, we were rushed into an incredibly packed coach. There were so many people. I don't know what I was expecting, but it was very disorienting, specially contrasted with the emptiness of the station.
The nice conductor saw me freezing in place with two kids and two grandparents, and she said "the train is packed, you won't find a place together unless you go to the dining car". I was still frozen. She took a long look at me and said "let me open the way for you" and she started navigating through this sea of people.
The dining coach only had a handful of people and we sat together at a table [thank you very kind conductor]. When I started to relax, I heard the sniffles. The teenager behind me was sniffling non-stop. I glanced back and it was evident that he was quite sick. He had a medical mask [thank you for trying], but I was uncomfortable and changed to the seat accross. When his dad brought a bunch of food, my anxiety kicked in, and I decided to go see if we could seat somewhere else.
The train was so full. I hadn't been on the Amtrak Cascades since 2018, and this didn't match my memories. While I remembered a spacious sitting space, this felt like walking through the aisle of a very packed airplane.
What was worse, every car had at least one or two sick persons. You could hear them sniffling (with or without medical masks). The second to last car didn't have functioning air conditioning, and I walked into a place with stale air where you could hear a guy hacking up a lung in the restroom. I walked back as soon as I could to the dining car and sat there in quiet desperation, hoping our masks would be enough. I knew Western Washington had a covid wave starting, but I have a hard time including this type of information when I plan for things different than what I usually do. And while I cannot know if all these sick people had covid, there is A Lot of sick people out there.
Back in town, my train-geek husband explained that Amtrack had retired most of their Talgo coaches after a derailment, and temporarily replaced them with something called Horizon. He didn't know they were so packed. This morning I looked online, and the difference is described as "business class in the Horizon is worse than coach in a Talgo".
If you made it here, I hope you don't judge my foolishness, wish us all luck in not getting sick, and please, avoid crowded places.
Family is in town and they enjoy doing long walks. But our town doesn't have any nature trails easily available and our car is too small to fit everyone.
There is, though, a nearby town that has one of our favorite trails. The trail is close enough to the bus station that we could send half the party by bus and then shuttle everyone by car to the trail in two groups. We sent my parents to the other town by bus, and the rest of us followed in the car.
Half way through, I remembered the bus service stops quite early on the weekends. If we tried to go to the trail, they would be stuck without a ride back. I'm not good at changing plans. So after some thinking I realized we could still do it if we did the return by train.
Trains are awesome, do we agree here?
The kids also love trains, so I booked tickets for my parents, the kids, and me. Husband would drive the car back.
We spent the day out in relative quiet and all was looking good. The train station closes early in the weekends, so we waited at a very large platform, with maybe five or so other people. And we waited. The train was quite late, and when it finally came, we were rushed into an incredibly packed coach. There were so many people. I don't know what I was expecting, but it was very disorienting, specially contrasted with the emptiness of the station.
The nice conductor saw me freezing in place with two kids and two grandparents, and she said "the train is packed, you won't find a place together unless you go to the dining car". I was still frozen. She took a long look at me and said "let me open the way for you" and she started navigating through this sea of people.
The dining coach only had a handful of people and we sat together at a table [thank you very kind conductor]. When I started to relax, I heard the sniffles. The teenager behind me was sniffling non-stop. I glanced back and it was evident that he was quite sick. He had a medical mask [thank you for trying], but I was uncomfortable and changed to the seat accross. When his dad brought a bunch of food, my anxiety kicked in, and I decided to go see if we could seat somewhere else.
The train was so full. I hadn't been on the Amtrak Cascades since 2018, and this didn't match my memories. While I remembered a spacious sitting space, this felt like walking through the aisle of a very packed airplane.
What was worse, every car had at least one or two sick persons. You could hear them sniffling (with or without medical masks). The second to last car didn't have functioning air conditioning, and I walked into a place with stale air where you could hear a guy hacking up a lung in the restroom. I walked back as soon as I could to the dining car and sat there in quiet desperation, hoping our masks would be enough. I knew Western Washington had a covid wave starting, but I have a hard time including this type of information when I plan for things different than what I usually do. And while I cannot know if all these sick people had covid, there is A Lot of sick people out there.
Back in town, my train-geek husband explained that Amtrack had retired most of their Talgo coaches after a derailment, and temporarily replaced them with something called Horizon. He didn't know they were so packed. This morning I looked online, and the difference is described as "business class in the Horizon is worse than coach in a Talgo".
If you made it here, I hope you don't judge my foolishness, wish us all luck in not getting sick, and please, avoid crowded places.