Scattered Thoughts . . .

As we departed Denver on Amtrak's historic and scenic California Zephyr, the rain quickly turned to a heavy wet snow.  We had already been warned that we would be trying to get through a bomb cyclone snow storm before it was impassable.   We slowly made our way into the Rocky Mountains.  We had been looking forward to seeing the scenery on this part of our journey because everything we read about it told us it is spectacular.  This route is actually famous for the beautiful scenery through this section of the country so we were definitely looking forward to this part of our journey.    Passing through this bomb cyclone turned out to be a good news-bad news sort of thing.  The good news was that the snow would probably add interest to the landscape and particularly the expansive views out the windows of our roomette.  As a photographer, I was excited about that.  The bad news is that while the snow is falling from this monstrous cyclone circling far overhead, we probably won

After our lunch in Chicago at Lou Mitchell's restaurant and a little bit of a sightseeing walk back to Union Station, we spent a little time in the brand new Amtrak Metropolitan Lounge before boarding the California Zephyr.  The Zephyr would take us all the way to California through scenic sights such as the Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevadas, Moffat Tunnel, Colorado's Gore Canyon, Byers Canyon, Glenwood Canyon, Winter Park, Truckee River, Donner Pass, Donner Lake, and then into Roseville California where we would be greeted by Adam.  This leg of our journey would take about 50 hours spread across three days of the week. Since this leg is so long, I have decided to split up the blog entries for this leg.  This blog entry will be about our journey from Chicago to Denver.  We would be in Denver in just less than 24 hours after departing Chicago and traveling through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and part of Colorado. Although we enjoy every leg of our rail journeys, we were all very

We boarded the Lakeshore Limited in Springfield, Massachusetts in mid-afternoon after a quiet but nice evening at our hotel.  This was our third trip on the historic Lakeshore Limited route so we had a pretty good idea of what to expect...  the good and the not-so-good (more on that in another blog entry).  Sheila had booked us in two roomettes...  one for us, one for Will and Sue.   The roomettes have privacy, larger seats, a narrow closet and bunks.  These private rooms allow us to spread out a lot more than in Coach.  Will and Sue were in a roomette right across the narrow hall from us so we were still able to easily talk with them.   The Lakeshore Limited is a "Viewliner" train which includes a few sleeper cars, quite a few Coach cars, a Cafe car, and a dining car.  The dining car is located on the opposite end of the coach cars so this means that there is a bit more walking to do on these trains which, for a long cross-country journey, is welcomed news!  I thin

Talking with the staff at The Presidio, planning our visit... Our cross country rail journey to San Francisco by way of The Lakeshore Limited and California Zephyr trains has been foremost in our thoughts lately (even more than all our health problems so that is good news). This past weekend, we made some progress on these plans as we booked rooms for our stay in San Francisco.  At this point, we're not sure if we'll ever make it back to San Francisco so we decided to choose rooms which are unique, in a great location, moderately affordable, and meet the highest of standards. With this criteria, there wasn't much of a list of options. We quickly chose to stay at an inn on National Park grounds at The Presidio.  We needed to jump on booking these particular reservations because the rooms in this Inn on the grounds of The Presidio have a booked rate of 100% every single day since the inn opened more than six years ago. We knew that if we waited too long to make reser