Life with Wendell is always an adventure. My parents wanted to take their luggage and themselves to the train station in a cab, but he convinced them to go with us on the sky train instead. [Wendell's Note: Hobbit's frugal father, upon learning that we were going to take the SkyTrain for $10, decided to abandon his plan to take a cab for $40.] My parents are 65 and 70 and though healthy and spry, still 65 and 70. We had between the four of us:
3 large rolling suitcases
1 small rolling suitcase
1 large duffle
1 large carry on
1 small carry on
2 camelbacks
2 rack packs
4 panniers
2 bicycles
We ferried everything up to the top of the escalator. Then Mother would wait at the top with the sending pile and Dad would wait at the bottom with the receiving pile while Wendell and I ferried it all down the escalator. Then we had to repeat that step at the next escalator. Then we got everything all together so we could dash onto the skytrain when it arrived. Then repeat the process to get off the skytrain only by this time it was pretty full so we had to fight our way through people. Then we had to have Mother wait at the top of the elevator with the sending pile, Dad at the bottom of the elevator with the receiving pile while Wendell and I ferried in-between. Then we had to load everything up again to walk over to the Amtrak station.
But that wasn’t the end.
We couldn’t check our bags until 4PM so since we didn’t want to sit around the grotty train station we had to put our bags in holding for a cost of 3.00 each, and 6.00 for each bicycle box. With all that we had that added up. In addition, AMTRAK makes us dissemble and box our bicycles. Don’t get me started oh how much that ticks me off. Wendell got them disassembled and into the boxen. Fortunately the boxen were huge and he had to only take off the pedals and handlebars. I saw inside the baggage car and they could have just leaned the damm bicycles up against the wall it was that empty.
We were pretty tired, but hungry too so after putting our bags into holding we went to Gastown to look for food. We found good food but were nonplussed when we realized that we would have to pay for the meal.
After a nice meal we went back to the train station to repeat the comedy of getting the bags and bicycles out of hoc in order to get onto the train. The staff at the station is nice enough, it’s the bureaucrats at the Amtrak headquarters making stupid decisions about service on the West Coast that cause all the problems. The nice thing about the crappy train service out here is that all terrorists know that attacking a train is a pointless endeavor, so security getting on to the train is pretty easy to get through. You can’t bring the usual and expected stuff onto the train, like bombs and guns, but you can bring liquids and you can even wear your shoes!!! The train cars assigned to the Cascade run are really old, which actually translates into really comfortable. The seats were huge and we had more leg room than we knew what to do with.
When we got to the US border crossing the border guards wanted to do a training run with their drug sniffing dog. Wendell grumbled, "Can't they do a training run o na train that isn't already an hour late?"
So they planted some marijuana on the people sitting right behind us then brought the dog in to see how she would do. She found it right off and got her treat. It was fun to watch.
We got to Seattle only an hour behind schedule (for a 4 hour ride). Tracy picked up all four of us and all of our stuff. It’s amazing what she can fit into the van. Big thanks to Tracy for coming into Seattle and getting us at 11 at night.
A note about the cruise portion of our vacation. We had great weather, good scenery, the wildlife put in appropriate appearances. IT was fun hanging out with Mom and Dad and Wendell and I are considering doing a cruise with them again. It’s fun to have them to play with. In spite of the horror stories I’ve heard, our tablemates were awesome and we really enjoyed hanging out with them not only at dinner but outside of dinner also. I didn’t write very much because it went very smoothly, so I figured that everybody would find it boring to read about. However I have been told that everyone wants a blow-by-blow account of our days on the ship so they can live the vacation with us. So next time I’ll write more about what we do on the cruise.
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