This Week's Adventure

On Tuesday, I got to the train station early to make sure I didn't miss the train which was absolutely on time. A good omen I thought. I was heading down to Los Angeles to take care of some business and have lunch with a friend.

I was excited to be taking the train through this part of the world. It travels along the coast of Point Conception over territory you can't drive in a car. It was not breathtakingly beautiful, but still delightfully remote.

I settled in for the four hour ride, pulled out the laptop happy to see that there was power at my seat so I plugged right in. I admit it. I checked for wifi, but (thankfully) the train does not provide. So, I cracked into the changes I know I need to make on the beginning of the manuscript. All was going really well until . . .

We hit Ventura. It took them an extra few minutes to leave the station because they wanted to check on something. It turned out that something was a bad wheel on one of the cars. Apparently bad wheels can damage train tracks, so it was decided by the PTB to lose the car between Ventura and Oxnard. To do that we had to let the northbound train go by first and then do a bit of to-ing and fro-ing as we dropped off the car and then reconnected the train again. They apologized over the delay which was supposed to take about an hour. And then they apologized again. And again. And again.

This was really the most apologetic group of Amtrak employees I've ever experienced. That's because it actually took three hours before we were en route again.

During the time we were stuck on the tracks, I was able to hop onto someone's wifi for a short while and, ironically, one of the emails I downloaded was from Amtrak encouraging me to buy Amtrak products for Xmas.

I really don't think so.

Of course at that point, I didn't know how late we were. But they had turned off the air conditioning and I was beginning to think of asphyxiation as a possibility.

We did finally get going. And instead of lunch with my pal I had an edible chicken caesar salad for the bargain price of $6 from the cafe downstairs. Next time I'll bring an emergency sandwich, I think. And some tea.

It's important to know . . . there is real time . . . and there is train time. Tuesday we were functioning on train time.