The First Leg

Well, I must say that the first leg of my first Amtrak trip is not shaping up to be a very good one.

Let me start from the beginning.

While waiting to board my first train, a woman with cracked out hair kept asking me to watch her bags so she could go outside and smoke. I don't mind doing nice things for strangers, especially when it requires little to no effort on my part, but this woman was very, very odd. It probably didn't help that it was 2:30 am and I was tired and nervous and old men kept falling asleep and snoring something horrible.

As it turned out, my first train was two hours late, giving me an additional two hours of sitting next to the crack-hair lady. And then when the train finally arrived and I was able to board, the person I was supposed to sit next to stole my window seat! I didn't think it would be that big of a deal, and all I really wanted to do was sleep, anyway, so, I let it slide. But before I could fall asleep, I got a whiff of the window seat thief's stale, greasy body odor.

While en route on this first train, we kept being stalled due to track congestion. We stopped repeatedly on the tracks and had to wait for things to clear up ahead of us. This put us an additional 3 hours behind schedule, and prolonged my exposure to Senor Stinky.

Eventually, it came to light that our delays were not the only obstacles to overcome. A train had derailed up ahead and we were now having to be rerouted. When I got off the train at one of Amtrak's stations, I was told to go speak to someone to find out about what my reroute would entail. I went to a desk that seemed likely to give me such information, but there was already a long line. I was ready to wait patiently, but then a white-haired, old lady budged to the front of the line. I thought to myself "she better have dementia, or I'll cut her so bad she'll wish I never cut her so bad".

When the worker at the desk, notified everyone that we were in the wrong place to obtain the information we needed for our various reroutes, we all flooded to the correct desk. And guess who budged to the front of the line one again--the old, white-haired lady! That wily she-devil!

And to make matters worse, the worker at this desk was an idiot. Instead of answering people's questions in the order which they lined up, he started walking around and answering random people's questions! Chaos! Chaos, I tell you! Everyone was shouting and trying to get his attention at the same time, and this really upset a man who was wearing a basketball jersey. He had been at the front of the line but was ignored by the ignorant worker. He started screaming "SIR! EXCUSE ME!" over and over again as the worker most likely ignored him. In the end, I was able to speak to the wandering worker, but he seemed like an idiot, so I left and decided to ask someone else about my reroute.

I think I have to catch a bus which will take me to another station, and then I'll get an another train that will eventually take me to my final destination. I guess I'll just have to wait and see. But when it's all said and done, I'll just be happy if I get all of my luggage in one piece. Here's hoping.

PS - All of these delays and reroutes might be my fault. While waiting to board my first train, I was reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It was at a point in the novel when a character was taking a train but kept getting delayed and rerouted. It appeared to be a bad omen, and I told myself that I was lucky that I didn't believe in such things . . . but it really does appear that I jinxed us. I jinxed us all.