Once again we decided to take Amtrak to the great white north, and once again we encountered strange and potentially maddening delays. Actually we were all remarkably calm about it — maybe we’re just getting accustomed to the Amtrak craziness?<\/p>\n
In this episode everything went swimmingly up to Springfield, MA, at which point we were told that a backhoe had struck a propane tank near the track somewhere north of us and the tracks were impassable. The plan was to put us all on buses between Springfield and Southern VT, at which point we’d get on another train and continue on our merry way.<\/p>\n
It didn’t sound too bad at first. But then they told us that the buses wouldn’t be there for an hour. And then told us that AGAIN an hour later.<\/p>\n
So we sat on the train at Springfield for nearly three hours. They’d closed the cafe car, which sucked, but there was a perfectly acceptable pizza + grinders (har — I couldn’t bring myself to ask for a hoagie) place near the station where I scored us some dinner. Gus watched The Neverending Story on the laptop (thank goodness for electricity on trains!) and Jonathan and I did a little reading.<\/p>\n
We all cheered when the buses finally arrived, and hopped on and settled in with the Game Boy + books. When the driver started it up the radio was blasting Loverboy’s “Turn Me Loose<\/a>,” which was utterly surreal. Dude, it’s a high school ski trip! It took ’til the end of the song for the radio to be turned off, so maybe it was the driver’s favorite?<\/p>\n The train station in Southern VT was a quaint olde timey place, all dark wooden benches and blissfully non-train bathrooms. There were two (2!) Thomas train tables with loads of trains. Gus and the three other kids (all of whom were well past prime Thomas age) seemed happy for the diversion. Jonathan and I were happy about the pretty decent coffee from a machine.<\/p>\n Once we were on the train again we SEEMED to be making good time. Still, we didn’t get in until after 10pm. Gus was still awake and Jonathan stauched the supercranky with the big guns: a new (to us!) Game Boy game<\/a>. Lots of reading required, too — sneaky parents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once again we decided to take Amtrak to the great white north, and once again we encountered strange and potentially maddening delays. Actually we were all remarkably calm about it — maybe we’re just getting accustomed to the Amtrak craziness? In this episode everything went swimmingly up to Springfield, MA, at which point we were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}