Southwest Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles

We had kind of a relaxing day before boarding our train in Chicago.  We kind of lounged around but we also ran a couple of errands before leaving the hotel.  We started with breakfast in the lounge where besides having a satisfying meal, we also stocked up on orange juice and cranberry juice for our trip.  The train would provide juice with our meal but we wanted our juice for mixed drinks.  Since our trip would be just over 40 hours by train, what else is there to do really?  We also ran out to grab some Garrett popcorn for our trip.  Garrett popcorn is famous in Chicago for its flavored popcorn.  We decided to get some cheese flavored and limited time only macadamia flavored for the train trip.  Our last stop was a Walgreen’s where we picked up some toiletries, a bottle of coconut run for Jackie’s drinks and a bottle of bourbon for Chris.  We were now all set for our trip.

Our train was not scheduled to leave until 3:00.  Our checkout was 1 PM so we knew we would be spending a little time in the station before leaving.  We grabbed a taxi for the short 10 minute ride to the station.  On the way over our cab driver almost killed someone.  A young lady was texting and listening to an iPod completely not paying attention to anything around her.  She had a don’t walk sign, the other 20 or so people with her all stopped but she just darted right into the street where our driver slammed on the breaks pretty hard and laid on the horn.  The lady had a scared look on her face, and rightfully so.  When we arrived at the station we attempted to check our bags.   We found that one of the bags was overweight by 6 pounds.  We learned that there was no leeway so we had to go off to the side and repack the bags a little bit, moving 6 pounds worth of stuff from one bag to the other.  When we were satisfied with our packing job we got back in line and re-weighed the bags.  At first the guy checking in the bags thought we had missed the cutoff to check bags for our train (the cutoff is 45 minutes) but he quickly realized he was wrong.  Our bag now weighed in at 50.7 pounds and he actually had to ask his co-worker if it was ok to accept the bag that was overweight by 0.7 pounds!  Lucky for us it was fine.

We waited for our boarding announcement in a lounge.  At 2:15 they made an announcement for sleeping car passengers and we got on the train.  After finding our way to our room and dropping off our smaller bags, Chris got out and walked the length of our train and took some pictures, both inside and out.  Our train is being pulled by two engines, followed by a baggage car, a crew sleeping car, two passenger sleeping cars, a dining car, a combined lounge/sightseeing car, and 3 coach cars.  This would be our home for the next two days.

Downstairs of our sleeping car.  There is baggage storage plus a couple of rooms downstairs.

Our room, day time setup.

Dining car

Observation car

More observation car

More dining car

Hall way of our sleeping car.  We are the 2nd room on the right.

Free drinks and coffee in our sleeping car

We had taken overnight train trips five times before.  Each of our previous trips was one night; this would be our longest trip so far, at two nights.  In the past we have stayed in smaller rooms which consist of a pair of seats that face each other which fold into a bed at night with a second bed that folds down from the ceiling.  The width of that room is only about 3 ½ feet with rooms on each side of a narrow hallway leading down the center of the car.  The bathroom and shower is typically down the hall and is obviously shared.  For this trip we opted for a larger room.  Our room is more than double the width at 7 ½ feet wide, has a row of seats where three people could sit next to each other with a 4^th seat opposite the row.  There is also a shower, sink and toilet in the room so it offers a little more privacy. The shower and toilet are in the same stall, saving some space but making it so that unless you’re going to get soaked there is no way you can possibly shower and go #2 at the same time.  The larger seat folds into a bed that is sized somewhere in between a twin and full sized bed.  Another single bed folds down from the ceiling.  We did not use the upper bed as we found that the larger bed was big enough for the two of us.

One of the smaller rooms.  The two chairs fold into a single bed and another bed folds down from the ceiling.

Our bedroom - night time configuration

Shower/toilet

Sink

We were also offered free dining on board with the purchase of our sleeping car accommodation.  Since there is only one dining car for the whole train you have a choice of times for lunch and dinner and more than likely you are sitting with someone else.  We opted for the earliest possible dinner (5:00) on the first night because we had not eaten lunch.  We were seated with a young lady returning to college in Missouri after spending some time at home just outside of Chicago.  We each ordered a steak for dinner and while it certainly was not gourmet fare it was satisfying.  We also had a nice dessert of cheesecake and blood orange sorbet. 

Dessert

We returned to our room and watched the scenery go by before getting off of the train at one of the extended stops in Ft. Madison, IA.  While the train makes numerous stops, most stops are nothing longer than a minute or two for people to get off and on.  Bigger towns or cities typically have longer stops to allow a little bit of time to load and unload luggage.  Some towns have even longer stops to allow for smoking breaks or a crew change (the engineer and conductor are bound by federal hours of service laws so they strategically change them out rather than risk them running out of time in the middle of nowhere…if that were to happen the train would come to a stop no matter where we were and we would have to wait for a relief crew to arrive).  Ft. Madison was a crew change point and because our new engineer was not yet there when we arrived we had about a 40 minute wait.  This allowed us to get out and stretch our legs a little bit and take pictures of the setting sun.  After this stop we went back to our room, read a little bit and had a few drinks.  We got off the train one more time in Kansas City, as it was another long stop.  After Kansas City we went to bed.

Smoking break

Our sleeping car attendant, Joe

The baggage car

Ft. Madison, IA

The next day the scenery became much more diverse.  Sleeping on a rocking train isn't the easiest thing to do and we woke up several times in the night, mostly when we stopped for stations or when the track conditions became poor enough that the train really swayed from side to side.  As a result of waking up so many times we got to see a nice sunrise somewhere in western Kansas.

Sunrise in Kansas.  Blurry at 60 mph.

While we mostly traveled through flat farmland the first day, when we awoke we could see the Rocky Mountains in the distance.  The train turned southwest soon after entering Colorado and we crossed Raton Pass.  A large sign on the side of the tracks told us that we crossed the pass at just over 7500 feet in elevation.  The trip through the mountains was curvy and very slow going.  Once we came down out of the mountains and into northern New Mexico it was mostly flat again and the train picked up speed.  We made brief stops in a couple of small towns including Jackie's favorite, Raton (Spanish for mouse, Jackie's favorite type of rodent).

Another smokers' stop in Raton, NM.  "Downtown" is off to the left in the picture.

The next big stop was Albuquerque, NM.  Since the scheduled stop was about 50 minutes Chris had big plans.  We had been craving green chile cheeseburgers and New Mexico is THE place to get these.  Chris researched just where he would get these burgers during our station stop.  The place was about 2 miles from the station which would be no problem to get to and back in 50 minutes.  All we needed to do was grab a taxi, have the driver take us there, wait while we got the burgers, and return to the train with plenty of time to spare.  Only problem was that there were no available taxis when we got there.  By the time a taxi arrived we thought we would be cutting it too close so we didn't even attempt it.  Instead of the cab we stayed in the station area.  There were about 2 dozen or so stalls set up with Native Americans selling different kinds of things from blankets to jewelry.  We bought a turquoise ring and before we knew it, it was time to get back on the train.

Vendors in Albuquerque

The remainder of the trip was uneventful.  We ate lunch with a couple from Germany who were on their honeymoon and we had dinner with two guys.  One of the guys also got on in Chicago and was traveling from Jacksonville, FL to Los Angeles via Washington DC and Chicago.  We didn't get into it but we assumed he was afraid to fly and the most direct route from Florida to LA was up the east coast to either Washington or NY, then to Chicago and finally to LA.  The other guy got on in Colorado and was travelling to Arizona.  The train traveled pretty fast the rest of the trip and we arrived in Los Angeles about 1 hour ahead of schedule, at 7 AM.  We collected our luggage and found the bus that would take us to LAX where we were picking up a rental car.  While we were sitting in our seat the same German couple walked past us and said hello.  Once we got to the airport where we would board a shuttle bus the same German couple was sitting at a bench looking lost so we offered our help.  Turns out they were looking for the rental car company, which at LAX is off site so they needed a bus. Since they were going to the same place as us we offered to take them there, and they accepted.  Having been in a foreign country and not being fluent in that foreign language we felt bad for them and we are pretty sure that it would have taken them much longer than the 10 minutes it took us to get to the rental car center had it not been for us.  We wished them well, grabbed our car and we were on our way.

Our Walgreen's purchase.  Makes the train trip more fun.

Chicago Beer Tour

We had a day and a half to spend in Chicago before we boarded our train for Los Angeles.  Last year while staying in Chicago we went on a beer tour, which is a walking tour around one of Chicago’s neighborhoods, visiting various bars while sampling local beers and learning about the history of the area we walked through.  We had so much fun last year that we decided to do it again, this time in a different neighborhood.

We checked in to our hotel the night before, staying at the Renaissance in downtown Chicago.  We were given a complementary upgrade to a larger room with a really nice view on the 25th floor.

View from the room

Our tour did not start until 1:30 and we were awake full from our breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant, and ready to go by 11:30.  Since it was a nice day and we had some time to kill we decided to walk part way and perhaps take the subway the remainder of the way to the meeting point of our beer tour in the Lakeview section of the city, about 3 ½ miles outside of downtown.  We started walking, mostly taking our time.  We passed by an interesting bar on our walk, the Green Door Tavern.  The building was built just after the Great Chicago fire of 1871 before new building codes went into place prohibiting the construction of wooden commercial buildings.  Shortly after the building was built, it started settling and it has been that way, leaning slightly to the right, ever since.  We continued walking and it wasn't too long that we realized we probably would not make it to the first stop on the bar tour.  We had a little over a mile still to walk with under 20 minutes to get there.  We decided to just hail a cab because we did not want to have to hurry and risk being late.

When we entered the first bar, Harrigan’s, not only were we the first from the tour to arrive, we were also the only patrons in the bar.  We ordered a couple of beers while waiting for the remainder of the tour group and our leader to arrive.  Our tour group consisted of only 7 people, which turned out to be   a good sized group.  It wasn’t too big and it wasn’t awkwardly small.  After trying 4 different beers at the first bar we headed for our second stop, Paddy Longs.  

Paddy Longs is a beer and bacon bar.  If you’ve never heard of a beer and bacon bar then where have you been?  Our tour paired three different kinds of bacon with 3 different kinds of beer and it was like we were in heaven.

Good news!

Irish bacon

Peppered bacon

Jowl bacon

Our next stop was at a craft beer and liquor store, rather than the traditional bar.  The stop, at a place called Bodega Ramos, included a small demonstration on the beer making process.  While we have certainly seen this before it was nice to have it shown to us in a small group setting.

After leaving the Bodega, we went to a place called Atlas Brewing Company, a small craft beer brewery that brews their own stuff.  Like each of the other places, we sampled a few different brews including one 10.5% APV porter.  As is usually the case with darker beers, Chris drank Jackie’s.

We then headed next door to our last stop, Delilah’s, which is a punk rock bar plus has a selection of over 300 different kinds of whisky!  We had our obligatory beer sample but also got a sampling of whisky to wash it down.

By this time we were starving.  When we were last in Chicago back in May of last year the taxi driver who picked us up from one of the touristy pizza restaurants told us of a much better pizza place a little out of the way that many locals enjoy.  We vowed to visit this place the next time we were in Chicago, which was today.  Since the restaurant, Peouod’s Pizza, was only about a mile and a half away, we again decided to walk.  Once we got there we enjoyed some delicious deep dish pizza.  We couldn’t really say if the touristy spot was better or not, but the pizza really did hit the spot.

After a nice meal, we were longing for our hotel room so we pulled up an app that Chris had downloaded which told us the quickest way to get between addresses using public transportation.  What the app did not tell us was what the train schedule was.  The app told us to go to a nearby train station but it failed to mention that on Sundays this particular train line only had a train every 2 hours or so.  So we decided that we would take a taxi or a bus, which ever we saw first.  After walking about a block we hit a bus stop and soon after a bus came by.  We knew we would have to transfer to a subway but we had walked so much that we just needed to sit down.  We had a small amount of money left on one of our transit passes and Chris was lucky enough to have the exact change ($2.25) for the other fare and we rode the bus about a mile to the subway, which we took to our hotel.  We then enjoyed some cookies and juice in the hotel’s lounge before heading up to our room.

Last Day in Milan

On Sunday we had the most beautiful weather of our trip.  While it had been raining Friday and Saturday, Sunday started out with warm weather and clear skies.  We decided to head back to a couple of places that the tour bus had passed the previous day but was too rainy and raw to enjoy.  For some reason we skipped breakfast, later in the day we would pay for this mistake, and we walked about a half mile to the nearest trolley stop and boarded a trolley towards Naviglio Grande, which is one of a series of canals that once ran throughout the city.  It was built in the 1200’s originally for irrigation but eventually was used, well into the 1900’s, for transporting goods.  Today many of the canals have been covered over or filled in but the Naviglio Grande remains lined with shops, cafes and restaurants.  While we were there the canal seemed kind of dry but we enjoyed exploring the area on the nice clear day.  On one of the bridges spanning the canal we spotted more “love padlocks” like we had seen on the Brooklyn Bridge just a month or so ago.

Love padlocks

We were going to board our tour bus again to take us to the other side of the city but we figured that a trolley would be much quicker as the tour bus was not due for 40 more minutes and it took a zig-zagging route through the city while the trolleys ran every 5-10 minutes and were far more direct.  The trolleys run somewhat on an honor system but rarely does anyone check for tickets.  You cannot pay on board but you should have some kind of rail pass or ticket that you can buy in subway stops.  We had purchased a 24-hour ticket the day before and as fate would have it there were two plainclothes transit officials checking for tickets on our trolley.  They were just going up to people and asking to see their tickets.  We saw them writing a ticket to a guy who apparently did not have a ticket but we thankfully did not try to cheat the system.  

One of the many trolleys around town

We took the trolley to the north side of the city to a large cemetery that we had read about called Cimitero Monumentale (Monumental Cemetery).  What caught our attention and made us decide to come there was the abundance of artistic tombs and monuments throughout the cemetery.  We could have easily spent an entire day exploring this large cemetery.  Many of the tombs and elaborate statues were truly impressive, as was the main entrance which was through a large marble and stone chapel. 

Angel of death in the guise of a young man welcoming the soul of the deceased

Parting Kiss by Emilio Quadrelli

After leaving the chapel we decided to go to a bookstore, something that had certainly not been on our list just the day before.  The night before we got a message from our Uncle Timmy alerting us to an article that listed the “18 Bookstores that every book lover must visit at least once”.  As it turned out one of them was in Milan so we decided to check it out.  The bookstore was a little more than a half mile walk from the cemetery which took us about 15 minutes to get to.  The bookstore was actually quite tiny and sold books mostly relating to art, fashion, and architecture but the draw of the place seemed to be the tucked away location and nice outdoor garden like atmosphere.  

10 Corso Como entrance

Inside the book store

Cafe downstairs, art & books upstairs

We then boarded the sightseeing bus once more for our ride back toward downtown.  The sightseeing bus has 3 routes and we had not yet taken this route so we got to see another part of the city that we hadn’t seen the day before.  After waiting for what seemed like forever our bus finally showed up.  They do run on a schedule but traffic obviously had a big effect on whether or not they run on time.  We were actually quite hungry by now, having skipped both breakfast and lunch.  We rode for about 40 minutes, again zig-zagging through the city and we got off near the Duomo once again and started seeking out a place to eat.  

We quickly found a place to eat.  We were initially going to eat outside again but the outdoor seating area at this place was not heated and it was later in the afternoon and quite cold.  We each ordered some regional specialties: risotto alla milanese, which is a mix of rice, saffron, grated cheese, butter, wine, and chicken stock.  We also had ossobuco, which are veal shanks cooked until the meat falls off the bone, then cooked with tomatoes, vegetables, and white wine.  We also enjoyed some Italian beer and wine.  As was the case the previous night we found that our poor Italian speaking skills were just enough to get by.  (Actually Jackie understood and could read far more than we thought we would know, which allowed us to get quite easily)

San Carlo Bistro

Risotto

Free dessert

We then headed back to the Duomo where we had intended to climb to the top of and get a great view of the city at night.  Unfortunately, the stairs to the top closed around 5 this time of the year and we had missed our opportunity.  We did enjoy exploring the area around the Duomo and checking out close up this massive church.  We could now see why it took nearly 600 years to complete.  The level of detail carved into the building was truly amazing.

Duomo Plaza at night

Some of the details on the Duomo

We then headed back to our hotel to pick up our luggage which we had dropped off with the concierge earlier in the day. Our flight was at 10 the next morning and we were staying at a hotel much closer to the airport that night.  We got back to our Marriott, grabbed our luggage and got a taxi for the train station.  As we were about to get into the taxi one of the employees of the hotel came running out to tell us we left something in our room and it was at the lounge on the 7^th floor.  So Jackie got in the cab, with the meter running, while Chris went searching for our missing bag.  We were sure we hadn’t left anything but they said we did so we had to check it out.  While Chris was inside and Jackie was sitting in the back of the cab with the meter running, a guy got into the front seat of the cab and told the driver to take him someplace.  The driver started driving away, forcing Jackie to tell “No!”  The driver looked at Jackie then looked at the other passenger, who looked at Jackie with an angry look on his face.  He knew Jackie was in the cab when he got in but must have thought they were going to share the cab or something.  The driver insisted he get out and get in another cab while he waited for Chris to come back downstairs.  As it turns out we did not leave a bag in the hotel, it was someone else’s bag.  Once we got that mess straightened out we headed for the train station and boarded our train for the airport.

Train for the airport

Once at the airport we grabbed the hotel’s shuttle for the quick 5 minute ride to our hotel, which we arrived at around 10 PM (and stayed for free using points!).  We got a good nights’ sleep and caught the shuttle for the airport around 8 the next morning.  We had one more adventure before leaving the hotel.  While we were sitting on the crowded shuttle bus about to leave (there were probably 30 people on the bus), Chris had a bad thought enter his head:  where are the passports?  He could not remember where he put them so he figured he must have left them in the room.  Chris told Jackie to take the bus to the airport and wait there for him while he got off and went back to the room to make sure the passports were not there.  We could not risk getting to the airport and then searching for the passports because the bus ran every 30 minutes and we would easily lose an hour in getting to the airport, searching, taking a bus back and then going to our room.  At least this way we would only lose 30 minutes while Chris went upstairs, checked, then grabbed the next bus to the airport.  Chris ran off of the bus just as it was about to leave and asked at the front desk for a key to the room we had just checked out of.  They gave him a key, he ran upstairs and lo and behold, there were the passports sitting on the desk.  Jackie usually checks for last minute things but for whatever reason neither of us did this time.  Chris went back downstairs expecting to sit around for 25 minutes for the next bus but discovered that the bus driver saw him get off and decided to wait for him.  There were probably 30 unhappy people on that bus, but Chris never expected him to wait.  We were glad he did because it took us nearly an hour to navigate through check-in, customs and security and walk to our gate.  Another 30 minutes would have been cutting it close and another hour would have made it far too close for comfort as we would have likely had to run around the airport and we still may have missed our plane.

We finally boarded our plane, which this time was practically empty.  The rows in coach were 7 across, 2 seats by the window, an aisle followed by 3 middle seats, another aisle and 2 more seats by the window.  We were seated 3 rows from the back and there was not a single person behind us on the plane nor was there anyone else in our row of 7.  So theoretically we had 21 seats to ourselves.  Jackie grabbed a middle row of seats to lie in while Chris stayed in the seat by the window and spread out into the open seat next to him.  In the seats in front of us on the plane most people were also able to spread out just like we did.  We watched probably 4 or 5 movies on our 8 hour flight home but we were very relaxed and well rested when we arrived at Newark where we grabbed a rental car (again free using points!) for the trip back to Rockland County.

Our empty plane