Scattered Thoughts . . .

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

I have a little time this morning so I figured that perhaps it is time to start writing and sharing photos from our cross-country rail journey.  It was a very long journey so I have a lot to write and a lot of photos to share.  In my preliminary notes for writing about this trip, I have broken the trip down into about 30 blog entries.  Of course, there is no way I will be able to write and share 30 blog entries today so I will continue to chip away at this list whenever I have some extra time and am feeling well enough to write.   So, back in March, in the wee hours of the morning in darkness, we excitedly prepared to leave the house on this long anticipated journey by rail.  This had always been a dream trip for us...  traveling across the entire country by rail... visiting various cities along the way... seeing the country right outside our windows from one coast to the other... s o we were pretty excited.  Neither one of us probably got much sleep that night before we left! We s

In between projects, when I have a little bit of time and I'm feeling fairly well, I always go back to some unfinished little projects.  Sometimes the weather interrupts a project.  Sometimes my health interrupts a project.  Sometimes other more important projects get bumped up in priority.  In time, I always get these little projects accomplished.  My health may require a lot more time than healthy people require but I always seem to eventually finish these projects. One of these projects that seems to be an on-going project is making a couple of homemade telescope mounts.  These two adaptable mounts are not 100% completed just yet but they are close.  They are close enough to being complete that I was able to test them a few days ago.  That was a nice feeling! I designed and built two types of mounts...  an equatorial mount (shown in this first photo, below) and an altitude-azimuth mount (shown down lower in the photos).   I have a very lightweight telescope mounted on the mo