We're home in Louisville now. The adventure continued, even after we arrived in Chicago. Amtrak was great compared to, well, you'll just have to read the rest of it.
We’re home. The last part of this trip has been a real adventure. At 4:00AM I was thinking about what I was going to put in this entry. At 4:00AM I was sitting on a Greyhound Bus in Chicago. The bus was supposed to leave at 3:00AM, but lets go back a little to what brought us to this point.
Amtrak put two agents on the train a La Cross, Wisconsin. They didn’t make any announcement of their presence for several hours. The agents worked with the first class passengers first. That took several hours. I found out about them when as I was talking to Miss Oliver, our coach attendant. I just ask her how would we find out what our options would be when we reached Chicago and she told me that the agents were in the lounge car taking care of passengers right now. This was around 11:00PM. I walked back to where they were and there were a few people in line waiting for service. Some were pretty upset. I didn’t have my tickets with me so I wasn’t completely prepared to talk to them but since there were only a few people there I thought I’d just wait a few minutes and see what they had to offer. The only guy behind me in the line was just wanting to vent on someone so I let him go ahead of me. After all, a few minute didn’t really matter. It would still be two hours or more before we arrived in Chicago. When I talked to the agent he offered me a few options. He knew that Greyhound had a bus departing at 3:00AM that could get me to Cincinnati around 11:00AM. He also mentioned a 7:00AM departure and another one around 11:00AM. He said they would put us up in a hotel for the night with a shuttle to and from the hotel if we wanted to rest for the night.
I went back and checked with Frances. I had a hunch that she just wanted to get home as soon as possible. I was right. I located the tickets for the trip back to Cincinnati and went back to make the arrangements. Amtrak gave me a voucher that I could cash in at the ticket counter at the Chicago station. They gave me $6.00 for cab fair to the Greyhound station. Then they gave me $36.00 for an evening meal for both of us and $104.00 for greyhound tickets. When I got to the station it took me less than five minutes to get through the line and get my money.
Amtrak did the best they could to make a bad situation better. I talked to several passengers that boarded along the way. Amtrak brought food into many of the station where there were large numbers of passengers waiting like at Spokane, Whitefish, and a few others.
I had looked at the timetable when we departed Portage Wisconsin and estimated our arrival in Chicago at 1:30AM. Amtrak had done everything they could to make up time. They announced stations well in advance and ask the passenger that would be departing to move to the door and be ready to detrain before the train arrived at the station. We made a few stops in under a minute. When only one or two people boarded, they put them on the train, closed the door and “highballed.” After the train started moving they found seats for them. The timetable has some buffer time built into it to allow for four or five minutes at a station for boarding and detraining but every time we made up five minutes, it seemed like we lost seven or eight minutes at the next station. We got to one station and one passenger was supposed to detrain. No one got off. The conductor called the passenger by name and after about six minutes they located the guy and put him off the train. He was supposed to be in one coach and had moved to another coach. Amtrak puts all passengers for some stations all in the same coach so that when they stop they only have to let passengers off one coach. They also do it because the platforms at some stations will not accommodate the entire length of the train. When we departed Milwaukee I revised my estimated arrival time to 1:34AM. My time was twenty minutes faster than what the timetable showed. I knew we should be able to make up that much time. I was right. It was 1:34AM plus a few seconds when we stopped at Chicago Union Terminal.
After cashing in the vouchers we made the short walk to the street to wait for a cab. Amtrak had called the cab companies to advise them that there would be several people needing cabs. The cab drivers were trying to pick up the larger groups first. They get an extra dollar per person so were able to pick and choose who got to ride first. Eventually they started picking up couples and singles..
The Greyhound stations seem to be a magnet for homeless, drunks, and bums, especially after dark and this morning was no exception. There were probably ten to fifteen people hanging out in front of the place and another dozen or so scattered around inside the place. I got into line to purchase a ticket. Serge was the only agent on duty and “he no speak too good American.” I ask for two tickets to Cincinnati. He processed everything and said $51.00. I ask, “Is that for two tickets?” After all, Amtrak gave me $104.00 for tickets. He said it was. Then he weighed the “checked” baggage, put a tag on them, and handed them back to me.
Checked baggage on Greyhound means that you carry your bag and sit it beside the bus for the driver to slide or throw into the storage area under the bus. Then when you get to your destination or transfer location, you claim your bags beside the bus and if you are transferring to another bus, you carry your bags to that bus and go through the process again.
Now, back to the tickets. I had two tickets. One ticket for Chicago to Indianapolis and one for Indianapolis to Cincinnati. I looked all over the tickets to see if it said anything about two passengers and I didn’t see anything to indicate the number of passengers. I went back to ask Serge, “Is this one or two passengers?” He assured me that I had tickets for only one passenger. After waiting on the lady in front of me (with a family off to the side) to decide if she wanted to check five bags or eight bags or maybe six bags, no lets make it seven bags, I finally got to purchase another ticket. By the time I got the second ticket the bus was about to board passengers.
The bus was nice and it was clean but it was quite a change from what we were accustomed to on Amtrak. The carry on that fit easily on Amtrak’s overhead rack was a very snug fit on the bus. That wasn’t the only thing that was snug. Sitting upright in my seat placed my knees about one inch from the back of the seat in front of me. A slight slouch to get comfortable and my knees were pushing against the back of that seat. The guy in front of me was going to lay his seat back but decided against it when he looked up and notice that he must have had his head in my lap while he was looking at me. Compare this to the space on Amtrak’s Superliner coaches. When we boarded the first Amtrak Superliner coach in Chicago, Frances had trouble reaching the footrest. If the person in front of you has their seatback as far back as it will go, you have no trouble getting out of your seat. You can even get out with the seatback table down. I thought about trying to type this on the bus but decided I didn’t really have room to open the laptop up enough to read the screen.
The bus was suppose to leave at 3:00AM. At about five minutes after that hour, the driver announced that they were waiting for the State Police to bring six people into the station that were delayed by a wreck somewhere. In about ten minutes we saw a State Police car pull up in front of the terminal and a wrecker behind it. They both let people out that walked over to our bus and got on. Well, fifteen minutes late. Not too bad. We have an hour and twenty minutes layover in Indianapolis before catching our Indianapolis to Cincinnati bus so we should still be OK. The bus is full. The driver ask a few people that were traveling alone to move to let families or couples sit together. People were pretty cooperative and a few quickly volunteered to move. Most were women that probably preferred sitting next to another woman rather that some man they didn’t know. It was nearing 3:30AM By this time everyone was seated and we were ready to go. The guy across the aisle from me had boarded the train in Whitefish, Montana and sat across the aisle from me on the train. I said something to him about not being as late as the train.
A few minutes later the driver boarded, sat in his seat, revved the engine two or three times and got off the bus. “I wonder what that’s all about?” I thought.
A few minutes later the driver boarded again and made an announcement. He said, “There is a problem with the bus and we’re going to see if we can fix it quickly and get on the road.”
I didn’t see any signs of anyone working on anything. They may have been on the other side of the bus or in the rear. I said to the guy across the aisle, “This is how it all started in Seattle. It was supposed to be a two hour fix and it ended up taking nine hours to resolve the problem.” Then I ask him, ”Do you suppose that if we miss our next connection they will reroute us on Amtrak?”
Around 4:00AM the driver announced that, “You aint going to like this but we’re going to have to change busses.” He gave us instructions to check our seat number and to take the same seats on the new bus.
The new bus arrived around 4:15AM. We left Chicago at 4:33AM.
Frances and I sat around mid-bus. Behind us was a group of African-American males, all probably around twenty years old. They were loud and their conversations were “MF this” and “MF that.” One was talking about just getting out of jail accused of auto theft. Another was talking about dealing drugs. Fortunately the driver announced as we left the downtown area that this was a night trip. He ask the passengers to keep the noise down and he turned the lights off. A few minutes after that the conversations stopped.
We arrived in Indianapolis after the departure time of the Cincinnati bus but Greyhound knew there were several connecting passengers coming in on the Chicago bus so they held up several connecting busses, including ours. We got off the bus, picked up our “checked” baggage. We walked into the terminal and got in line for the bus that was right beside our bus. Carried our “checked” baggage to that bus and boarded.
The Indy to Cincy bus was another exciting ride. It wasn’t quite as full. There was some guy several seats behind us that ran his mouth the whole time. He was on the bus from Chicago also but only because that bus left late. He was too drunk to ride at 3:00AM. The delay allowed him to sober up enough for Greyhound to let him ride. He was loud and obnoxious and the entire conversation was suitable only for a bar room.
Finally we arrived in Cincinnati. Jarred and Melissa had called about two minutes before and said they were having trouble finding the station. I saw my friend that boarded in Whitefish and said good-by to him and wished him luck with the rest of the trip. We both agreed that the accommodations and the people were much better aboard the train. He was going to Virginia and had six or eight more hours on the bus.
As we walked out of the station, Melissa and Jarred were pulling into of the lot. We loaded up our baggage and after about ten or fifteen minutes we were at their apartment. We were for the most part “Home again.”
We had lunch with Jarred and Melissa and went back to their apartment. I took a nice long nap. A storm came through late that afternoon and woke me up. "After the rain quit we loaded the truck up and drove home. We arrived at the house at 12:10AM