Chicago
As I indicated before, Chicago is a huge
contrast from Detroit. The city is alive
with businesses and tourism, the train station is big spacious and very busy
with travelers from all over the country and all over the world, vendors
everywhere, the water taxis on the river full of people going from one part of
the city, the tourist boats going up and down the river, business people in
suits busy walking down the streets surrounded by tall buildings. Unlike Detroit, you can feel the life in Chicago. With its financial sector and markets at the
core of the economy, is very diversified and it would be very difficult for it
to suffer the type of economic downturn that could happen to a one-product town
– like Detroit’s auto industry. It was
the auto industry lobby that kept mass transit from taking hold in Detroit, the
auto industry, although the savior of many World War II veterans through the “living
wage” won by the unions, politicians were seduced out of diversification and
away from promoting and insisting on higher education that would have catalyzed
diversification of the economy. Chicago
represents the alternative universe, the alternative timeline of how things
could have gone in Southeastern Michigan.
We had a three hour layover and Chicago
waiting for the Empire Builder and took advantage of the time to get out into
the city to exercise and get a charging cable for the Bluetooth keyboard that I
had planned to use to write my blog on the smart phone. We walked about 1.5
miles.
We left the Wolverine – the train from
Pontiac to Chicago and boarded the Empire Builder, the train from Chicago to
Seattle. The Wolverine is a commuter
train and if we compare it to a city bus, the Empire Builder is like the “Queen
Mary,” the luxury land cruiser of land travel.
It is a more quiet and smoother ride with dining facility, a observation
car and a cafeteria-snack bar.
Unfortunately the sleeper compartments were sold out 5 months before we
left and we had to ride coach – I felt like the second class passenger on the Titanic
compared to the first class passengers with sleeping compartments. But the seats were more comfortable than 1st
class seats on an airplane, and with the leg and foot rests, sleeping on them
was almost as comfortable as a bed. The
seating is “first come first serve,” but this is one time that being a senior
helps – we got to board first.
The coach seats were to be
our home for the next two days. We have
our small cooler with snacks and drinks, our computers and I-Pads, our books
and most important, we brought our internet router. Although most trains have internet service,
this one did not, but with MiFi, it don’t matter.
Our first real stop was in Milwaukee and we
got a chance to step out for a few minutes, the first of many quick smoking
breaks that we used to stretch and step out for a while from this massive pile
of steel that we were traveling in.
There number of farms grown corn in the Midwest
is amazing. Hundreds of miles for corn
field as far as the eye can see. It must
take a special kind of character to want to plant all this corn – being on a
tractor all day plowing, planting, harvesting, preparing the soil for the next
planning and back to plowing, planting, harvesting… in an endless cycle. I had a chance to go into farming; I thought
of it for about 3 seconds and decided instead to go into science and
engineering.
After several hundred miles of corn fields,
sprinkled with a few barns, houses and towns, the sun started to set as we
crossed Mississippi. I found out
something I did not know, just past the Dells we crossed the widest point of
the Mississippi River – over two miles wide!
One would assume that the river would get wider down by Louisiana, but
nope, it is wider up here. As the sun set
and we began to make ready for bed. I am
certain that the corn fields would continue throughout the night and I was
proven correct.
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