Valerie and I are off on another travel adventure. This time, we’re headed to New England via Amtrak!
We stayed up late on Saturday night to finish packing for the trip. After all these trips we’ve gotten better at packing, but I still am pretty slow at it and usually procrastinate until just before departure.
Early Sunday morning, Belinda drove us to Emeryville Amtrak station. For the first leg of our journey, we are taking the California Zephyr to Chicago. We used Amtrak reward points to book a sleeper roomette, a small private compartment with just enough room for two medium-sized adults to sit or sleep. In retrospect, perhaps we should have booked a larger sleeper or two roomettes.
On Amtrak, the sleeper cars come with up to 3 meals a day per person. While the menu remained the same every day, for each meal we were seated with different passengers. We met travelers from South Africa, members of an America By Rail tour group, and some people who were just commuting. The tour group was finishing up a 12-day journey around the United States by train. I think most of them had become tired of train food by this point in their journey.
One disappointing aspect of traveling by rail is that the train doesn’t stop in any place for very long. Passengers rarely have an opportunity to get out and walk around the town. Our longest station break was about an hour in Grand Junction, CO. Valerie and I quickly walked around the town, but didn’t get a chance to explore anything except for the town’s main street.
We arrived in Chicago Union Station about an hour behind schedule on Tuesday evening. We took a bus to our hotel, MileNorth, near the Magnificent Mile. After checking in, we walked to nearby M Burger for dinner. After looking at Yelp, Valerie was intrigued by the reviews for the fancy nearby restaurant TRU (jackets required). We got as dressed up as we could (as neither of us had packed any dressy clothes) and went for dessert just before they closed. They were kind enough to lend me a jacket and dessert was delicious.