The train trip would be slow and long, but I'm not sure I was ready for this.
First, the seats aren't even as comfortable as airlines seats. Lots more leg room though. But I kept sliding off. Urg.
I was warned the dining car food wasn't great, but I decided to have dinner in it for the experience. Food was beyond awful. I had the ravioli. Chef Boy-R-Dee ravioli would have been better.
When I got back from dinner, someone was sharing my row. This was around Eugene. All the way to Eugene I had the two seats to myself. She was cute though. And working on a dissertation comparing clitoral mutilation to breast implants. We pretty much ignored each other (she worked on the dissertation and I was reading The Physics Of Superheroes). That is, until the white trash in the row across from us started talking. A hundred tales of drunken stupidity that sounded nowhere near as fun as Darren. She was talking to her seat-mate, but we got to be included by virtue of being the car. Then we found out about her husband to be's drug habit and how he enrolled in the navy to prove to her he was going somewhere. But this morning she received a call from him that he'd been caught with drugs and expected to be jailed and discharged. With every tale dissertation girl and I would roll our eyes at each other.
When I woke up this morning, we were about 2 hours behind. Sometime in the middle of the night we had to wait for some freight trains to maneuver, so the schedule was off. No problem for me though, as it's not like I am on a schedule here.
But we ended up even later than that. And that brings me to the titled of this entry.
Just after Sacramento we were heading into Fairfield, and the train hit a motherfucking car that tried to beat the crossing gate! Emergency stop. I noticed us stopping, but I didn't notice anything else. Dissertation girl, who I was sitting next to in the lounge car (we were avoiding white trash girl), saw a tire bouncing away. Other than that. We hadn't felt anything. That's what happens when a train weighing a few hundred tons hits a small truck weighing maybe one. Anyway, the guy in in the vehicle died. So we had to wait for a replacement crew (standard procedure) and an inspection of the train before we could move on. Surprisingly, this only took about an hour and a half.
SO now I'm in the café at the Red Victorian in Haight-Ashbury, writing up my experiences (and gonna write up a book review shortly), waiting for my brother to get off work.
I didn't have the worst day today.