If this is Ottumwa, Iowa, Corporal Radar O'Reilly must be somewhere around here. We were there but we didn't see him. Click below to see the rest of the story.
Good morning day seven. Not exactly sure where we are. I woke up a couple of time last night. I think I caught some kind of bug. My mouth and throat are dry and my nose is slightly stopped up. Not all that bad, just sort of a nuisance.
We were in either eastern Nebraska or western Iowa. Our next stop would be Creston Iowa. I think I remember waking up in Omaha. It may have been Lincoln. I woke up but I sure wasn’t awake. As the sun came up there was no doubt that we were in the flatlands. Unlike North Dakota and eastern Montana, there were patches of trees, corn fields, and other crops. The towns were closer together and more people doing more things. We arrived at Creston on time. Other than the “drug bust” of the first day and the fog of southern Oregon and northern California, we had been pretty much on time during our whole trip. We were hoping to continue with our on time success.
Ottumwa Iowa. This is the small town made famous as the home town of Corporal Radar O’Reilly in M*A*S*H. We arrived a few minutes early. The crew announced that it would be a smoke stop. Again, it was nice to step outside and stretch a little. We looked around but we never did see Radar, but, I guess we didn’t really expect to find him there.
We were still on time but that was about to end. It was either at Burlington or Mt Pleasant when things started running amuck. I had my scanner on so I had a pretty good idea of what was going on. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) had some damage with their signal and control equipment. Seems like there had been a lightning storm during the night and it had caused some damage. The dispatcher was unable to remotely control some of the switches and had lost the ability to monitor traffic in some locations. As we left the station we had to stop so that the engineer could align a switch for our train. After the end of the train passed that switch we had to stop again so that the conductor at the rear of the train could re-align the switch back to its normal position. This had to be repeated two or three more times. All dispatching had to be done by radio and it all took time. We would move a couple miles and stop before getting permission to continue. It didn’t take long for us to end up over an hour behind schedule. This was probably about the worst place to start running late. We were scheduled to arrive in about three hours and there was very little time and only two stops where we had any chance of making up any time. We would end up at Naperville over an hour late.
We knew that the Mennonite family would be getting off at Galesburg and we had had such a great time talking with them the day before. We walked back to their coach and shared a few more minutes with them and told them how we had had such a great time talking with them yesterday and we complemented them on their children’s behavior.
Our scheduled arrival time at Naperville was 1:47PM but we didn’t get there until about 3:00PM. We unloaded our baggage and moved it all to the other side of the station. My brother and I caught a cab back to the church where we had parked. The cabbie was one of those guys that thought he was the only one in town that had the right to be on the streets at that time. At the church I stopped in and thanked the guy that I had made the arrangements with then we were on our way to pick up Sonny and Kirk and our luggage. That cabbie that took us to the church must have tried taking a short cut that went bad for him. We took the main road back to the station and ran into much less traffic. We loaded everyone and everything into the car and we were on our way home. Time now was getting closer to 4:00PM and the afternoon rush was under way. We had wanted to miss that and if we had arrived on time in Naperville, we probably would have been ok. We ended up taking a detour that added a few miles to our trip but in the long run, it got us home a little quicker.
The rest of the trip was just a car ride. I had been through there several times and if anything needed to be mentioned here, it was mentioned when I described the trip to Chicagoland. A pit stop for gas and some KFC between Chicago and Indy and we’d be in Louisville by early morning.