The end.

I arrived home early this morning, and pretty much on time. That last night on the train was about the worst of the lot. I woke up every few minutes and looked at my watch, it seemed. It was bitterly cold. And in the middle of the night I had a dream that I was on a dark and crowded bus with a friend. A man had been teaching him how to smoke a hookah, but I was having trouble with it. Then I kept feeling things moving and nipping in the darkness around my ankles, and I began to get anxious. The bus stopped and strange and threatening men got on, and started to swarm over the backs of the seats towards us, clawing at us and at our things. I was trying to cry out or scream, but I couldn't make any proper noise, just a kind of whimpering groaning noise. Then the girl in the seat next to me touched me on the arm and said, "Are you all right? You were having a nightmare." I started laughing instead, partly from relief at being rescued from it, and partly at the strangeness of having a nightmare in public. The girl told me this morning that once on the train she'd woken herself up screaming.

Below is the account of the last parts of the trip that I wrote yesterday evening.

Sunday 30th December, 6:30 p.m. Between Ottumwa and Osceola, Iowa
(a lot of vowels around here).

I’m on the last leg of my journey home. I’ll arrive, if we’re on time (which remarkably we seem to be so far), at 7:15 tomorrow morning.

From Montreal I took the train back to Schenectady. Boarding at the Gare Centrale in Montreal was straightforward and organized in a way it wasn’t anywhere else on the trip. You arrive at the station and find an enormous but orderly line of people already formed – I was nearly at the end, even though I was there an hour or so before the train went. Once on the platform, as with everywhere else they asked where we were going and directed us onto carriages accordingly, so that even though I was so far back in the line and could see when I got to the train that the early carriages were packed (those going to New York), my own carriage was quiet and I could get a window seat without trouble. For the first few stations the conductor kept telling us that the train was fully booked and that every seat was going to be filled further down the line, but as usual it wasn’t true.

Though many of the Amtrak staff have been pleasant and cheerful, there seems to be an undue number of officious types working for the company. The conductor on that train kept directing snide remarks at some group of people behind me who were presumably shuffling over in their seats so that they could talk to each other – she’d tell them that they had to make up their minds where they were sitting because people would be getting on and they had to know which seats were free (when they collect your ticket they put a slip of card with your destination marked on it in the overhead rail, by your seat number and its window/aisle description). Apart from the fact that we were at this point far from the coming stations, at which no-one much got on anyway, her manner was unduly patronizing and antagonistic. In the waiting room at Schenectady there was a woman who had evidently suffered even worse treatment at the hands of Amtrak staff – she’d been separated from her husband at some earlier stop along her journey. As far as I understood it (she was complaining to the station official about it) he’d got off and when he’d tried to get back on the conductor had seen him but closed the doors anyway. A woman with her corroborated the story. It seems not at all unlikely.

On the train to Schenectady I sat near the woman who’d been in the empty carriage with me on the last part of the journey to Montreal. We’d worked out at the time that we’d be traveling back on the same train, and changing onto the same onward train at Schenectady. She was from somewhere near Seattle, and had been on her way to Quebec (the city, that is) for a break arranged through an organization the name of which I remembered as senior hostel, but looking online think it must have been Elderhostel. It sounded like she had a great time. The advantages of such an arranged group trip over my own are obvious – that you have company, and that you don’t walk around missing meals. I might try it sometime (though not through Elderhostel yet, of course), especially if I’m going to make a habit of going away over Christmas.

My companion had previously been on trains before all round the country and also across Canada, and to my surprise said that in her experience the Canadian company VIA isn’t really any better than Amtrak. On the way out she’d been in the sleeper cars for her overnight trips, and after our Coach experience that night she said that she would be making sure she got sleepers for all stages next time. Me too – if I ever do this again, I have to have a bed. The coach seats are comfortable for sitting, but not for sleeping, and the cars seem to vacillate continually between stiflingly hot and freezing cold (just like my apartment, in fact – you’d think it would make me feel at home). From what she told me, it seems that if you buy your tickets early enough (I thought getting mine in October was early, but she told me she got hers in April), the sleepers aren’t too extortionate. There are two kinds, bedroom and roomette. Just now at Ottumwa where we had a fifteen minute “smoking stop” I walked up to the sleeper cars and peered in the window of an empty compartment, which I think was one of the roomettes she described to me. It is basically a tiny room just big enough for two seats facing each other, which (if I understood correctly) fold down into one bed, with another bed that can be folded out above if you’re sharing.

We arrived in Schenectady about an hour late, but I still had time to go to the Moon and River and have dinner – Moroccan soy chicken and flatbread. His dishes are quite simple, but very tasty – in this case soy and mixed vegetables with a hot oil and cumin dressing. I picked up a sandwich for my companion, who had decided it was too slippery outside to leave the station, and the owner also slipped in an extra portion of the fantastic flatbread for me, which was very nice of him. There was no-one else there when I arrived, but before I left a band that was going to be playing that night arrived along with their entourage. They filled the place on their own. I’d have liked to have stayed and spent the evening, but I had a train to catch…

The Schenectady-Chicago trip was uneventful. We arrived in Chicago in the morning a mere twenty minutes late. These journeys when you arrive in the morning are so much better than the evening arrivals of the ones on the way out. In both cases you have a nasty restless night, but in the former case you at least know you don’t have to keep sitting there for the rest of the day.

(Chicago - Union Station)

In Chicago my friend met me and drove me up to the place where we were staying (the apartment of a friend who was away). It was snowing wetly, and the route we took made Chicago look like Glasgow at its worst – an abandoned industrial wasteland. It’s lucky I was there for a couple of nights, because actually it’s much nicer and more interesting than that.

We went out again and had lunch in a neighbourhood with a lot of Middle Eastern restaurants and stores – I had a good big plate of falafel and baba ghanoush, hummus, and bread. In a shop next door we bought baklava and I stocked up on Turkish coffee. There are such stores in Denver too, but they tend to be far from the centre, stranded along Colorado Boulevard and similar busy soulless roads. Chicago seems to be built of such specific areas – including an unusually vibrant Chinatown, which we visited yesterday.

That afternoon we went for a drive around so that I could see the centre of Chicago and some of its more scenic views. It does have a lot of interesting buildings, though it’s certainly not the most beautiful of cities overall – in this way it is rather like Glasgow, though on a much grander scale. In Glasgow I always think that the buildings are too tall and set too close to the road, so that if you’re walking you’re unable to see much of them and feel penned in and overshadowed. It’s much worse in Chicago’s financial district – enormously tall buildings in this case so that the light is almost shut out (it doesn’t help that many of those buildings are of dark stone), glowering giants waiting to squash with their clubs any tiny people foolish enough to stray between their feet. The downtown area with the big hotels and shops is much nicer, though, and throughout the rest of Chicago there seems to be a very interesting mix of styles: some buildings look like London, some Glasgow, some Doncaster, some a variety of other European influences, some distinctly Midwest, some just generic concrete monstrosity (or is that Birmingham, with which Chicago is twinned?). After driving, we went to a Belgian beer pub and drank Duchesse de Bourgogne and ate onion rings and macaroni and stilton. The pub was very smoky, which was a surprise – it hadn’t occurred to me that it was legal to smoke in bars or restaurants anywhere in the U.S. any more, but it is of course a state by state thing. In Illinois a ban will come into effect next year.

(Oriental Institute)

Yesterday we went to the University of Chicago – a very beautiful campus, something like Trinity College Dublin, but better – to visit the Oriental Institute and the Smart Museum. The former has a museum of Near and Middle Eastern archeology/antiquities – all those Assyrian and Mesopotamian and Babylonian things you find in the British Museum, but on a smaller scale and thus a lot more accessible. The latter apparently has a large East Asian collection, but a lot of the space just now is given over to some of their modern European artworks (surrealist painting, art nouveau furniture, and other things) and a large and rather dull exhibition of Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery (presumably it wouldn’t be dull if you were a student of art history or cared passionately about the paintings of these particular masters). There was also an exhibition called Looking and Listening in 19th Century France, which included a number of Daumier prints. That was more interesting.

(University of Chicago)

Afterwards we visited the co-op bookshop in the Seminary, which is a beautiful building with a lot of carved stone and stained glass windows. The bookshop is in a catacomb-like basement and has everything – shelves of literary criticism, language books, a big East Asian studies section, the whole range of Oxford A Very Short Introduction books. I’d forgotten that there were such bookshops. The Tattered Cover seems like a very poor substitute.

We went off for dinner in Chinatown, and had very disappointing food in a groundlessly popular pan-Asian restaurant called Joy Yee's Noodles. Afterwards we bought mooncakes and custard tarts, left Chinatown and went off for a couple of drinks in a video bar (they play music videos on multiple screens on the walls), and then took a trip to Sam’s Liquor before heading home. I was told that Sam’s had everything, and it turned out to be true. I’ve been looking out for a while for a violet liqueur, and now at last I have a bottle (unless it is smashed to smithereens in my suitcase, which is possible. I forgot to mention that from certain stations and for certain trains you can check in your luggage as if you’re going on a plane. If they are as careful in their treatment of luggage as they are in treatment of people, I may never get to taste that liqueur. It would be nice to go around with all of my clothes smelling of violets, though).

This morning we went for brunch at Ann Sather, a very popular Swedish breakfast place. In this case the popularity is well-deserved. I had a breakfast wrap with eggs, avocado, tomato and peppers. It was a fatly stuffed wrap with hot filling, done in a nice fresh tortilla baked or toasted until lightly browned on top. It was more like having a pie than a wrap, if wrap brings to your mind those dry pre-packaged sandwiches that so often come under that name. It had with it a tasty green salsa, nice and spicy, and two sides of your choice. I had a fresh fruit plate, and wonderful thyme-flavoured (or was it sage? I never am sure which is which, since we always had both sage-and-onion and parsley-and-thyme stuffing at Christmas) hash browns, which were again less like ordinary hash browns than a kind of hot potato salad.

It’s taken me to Omaha, Nebraska, to write this – we’re pulling in now. I’m going to have to stop because I’m almost out of battery power. On the Lakeshore Limited and the Adirondack they have power strips running along the sides of the coaches with two sockets for each pair of seats, so that you can use laptops or other electrical items. The California Zephyr supposedly has outlets in the sleeper cars, but we common people don’t get such a luxury. I’ve located only two sockets, one in the observation car and one downstairs in the snackbar – but they both have people attached to them.

In any case, I am done. We drove around Chicago a little more, and then I went to get the train. As usual the waiting room situation was chaotic, and as usual the Amtrak worker managed to make it sound as if it was our fault, when it seems to me obvious that specified seat reservations would make everyone’s lives less stressful. I had a brief period between Ottumwa and Somewhere, Iowa where there was no-one sitting next to me, but it didn’t last. Perhaps because I’m on my way home as well as because this is my sixth train since I left I feel more edgy and less tolerant of being penned in by a stranger, so I have been spending more time in the observation car. I’d like to have longer away (forever, for instance), but if I can’t have that, I want to be home now and in my own space.