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Notes from a Vacation to Remember: Part 2

Day 2: Somewhere in North DakotaWe woke early in the morning to a foggy morning among North Dakota’s low hills.

It was really quite a pretty morning. Gina knitted and I read most of the day while we continued along towards Glacier National Park in northern Montana. Montana was mostly flat.

We got to Glacier very late in the day, so we only had a little bit of light as we went through the park.

Day 3: Somewhere in Washington

We woke to a clear morning with the Columbia River right to our south. I love this stretch of the USA. This wide river, a set of striking hills, the appearance of Mt. Hood. If there were a place in America that seems, to me, to capture the idea of “America,” it is here. I associate this stretch of river with Lewis and Clark’s expedition. I can almost picture them as they rowed their pirogues down this river, sensing that the Pacific Ocean was just a little ways away – their goal of reaching there nearly complete.

We took the Cascades train from Portland to Seattle. Unfortunately, this was not as scenic a trip as I had hoped. That train really seems to operate more as a commuter line between Seattle and Portland.

In Seattle, we stayed at the Bacon Mansion Bed and Breakfast. The owner was quite rude and bizarrely unsuited for operating a B&B, despite his 13 or 16 years of doing so. He barely mumbled hello, rushed us upstairs to our room, collected our money, and then departed. The Rose Room was, frankly, a mess. The shower was a former closet. To get to the toilet and sink, you had to cross the carpeted floor. The wood trim did not match, the nail heads showed visibly (OK, now, I am still going to get to the nail heads showing on our trim in our master bedroom…but I’m not charging $154 night for people to stay there either). The room was grandly pink and decorated with magnolia and peonies. I’m not sure I saw a rose in the room at all. The wardrobe lacked a handle to open the door. Instead, a pencil was jammed into where the locking mechanism would have been…you turned that to open the door. Sadly, it was a great looking piece, just needed a tad bit of work. Oh, and yeah, the track lighting above the headboard made it seem as if we were at a funeral home.

But we did not hang out for long, for we had the rehearsal dinner to get to. My friend Doug, whose wedding we are there in Seattle to attend, described the place as “not pretty.” Now, I’ve yet to encounter a Chinatown in the US (not that I’ve been to many…Boston, Chicago, and now Seattle) that is not somewhat sketchy. The good news is, though, the food is always fantastic, and so it was here at the Jade Kitchen. I did see my first geoduck here though.

to be continued…

Notes from a Vacation to Remember: Part 1

Reason for Travel: Marriage of Doug Bowers (long time friend) and Stephanie Suen in Seattle.

Planned Mode of Transport: Train, Amtrak’s Hoosier train from Indianapolis to Chicago, the Empire Builder from Chicago to Portland, the Cascades from Portland to Seattle. Return route: Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago, Hoosier from Chicago to Indiana.

First off, a huge congratulations to my great friend Doug and his new wife Stephanie!

DAY 1: 6:30 AM Train from Indianapolis’s Union Station.

Man, that’s an early departure time. Being paranoid about arriving late for trains, planes, and automobiles, I had a car service pick us up at 4:30 AM at our home (parking for so long downtown was more expensive than hiring a car to drive us). The driver proved to be a bit chaotic, so I was glad we were driving so early in the morning…we might have played bumper cars all the way downtown. He gently weaved across lines, took wide turns, and generally drove awful. We arrived safe and sound….

Union Station in Indy is a falling apart train station. The original wood benches are splintered, cracked, and in need of repair. The food and drink options (despite the early hours) might as well be nonexistent. One small, creaky elevator takes passengers and luggage up to the platform (we used the stairs). One couple took literally the Amtrak instructions to tag every bag: suitcase, suitcase, purse, camera bag, fanny pack.

The ride to Chicago is long and boring…at least for longtime Hoosiers like us. We arrived on time.

We left Chicago on time on the Empire Builder. This is the pride of the Amtrak cross-country service. Multiple sleeping and coach cars, a dining car, a sightseeing car with a lounge on the bottom. Gina and I booked a Superline Roomette, which is basically two wide padded chairs facing each other. These fold flat for one bed and a top bunk drops down from above. The shower and bathroom are shared by all the Roomette guests. The Roomette was smaller than we expected, but not overly so. We had plenty of room to stretch our legs and keep our carry on bags with knitting, reading, and writing materials handy.

We rode into Wisconsin and called it an early night (I mean, come on, we got up at 4:00 AM).

Back from Vacation

Am back from vacation. Doing lots of catching up with class and work. Will have much to report soon about our trip west and back.

Return on the Empire Builder

Here is our return route.

Empire Builder

Gina and I are on vacation. Yeah! We’re heading to Seattle to attend a very dear friend’s wedding. Rather than face the hassle of airline travel, Gina and I decided to use Amtrak. We’re leaving from Indianapolis and journeying to Seattle via Chicago and Portland (we’re returning directly from Seattle via Chicago). We’re hoping for relaxation, restfulness, beautiful sites, much reading, and much knitting. I hope to post occasional photos on Facebook. Map of route is from Amtrak’s Route Atlas.

This should be a great adventure!

Vacation Reading

Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book

Isaac Asimov’s Forward the Foundation

Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain

Writing and Fame…or…More Importantly…

My friend and excellent poet Jared Carter brought my attention to this article by Cynthia Ozick, which is a very insightful and excellent one. As a taste, I quote her quotation of Rainer Maria Rilke writing to a poet seeking the advice and acknowledgment of an already “successful” writer:

I beg you to give all that up. You are looking outwards, and of all things that is what you must now not do. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you to write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places in your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of the night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this ­necessity.

I think only artists who have wrestled with the rationale of why they write, what compels them to continue on in face of rejection after rejection, of the perplexed and confused looks, of the dismissive comment can really comprehend this statement, let alone write. The desire for fame, so powerful in our culture, is, in the end, only brief. What seems today so wrenchingly powerful, so stunningly fraught with meaning, often passes to obscurity. In the end, only very few things live beyond their time, even fewer into the centuries. Write and create because it is necessary, because it is human.

John Keats

I quote from Stanley Plumly’s Posthumous Keats:

Keats’ first publisher, Olliers, dropped him, and his second, Taylor and Hessey, sold copyright to the poems and unpublished manuscripts for exactly fifty pounds, less than twenty-five years after his death, because of lack of readership.

Keats’ worries about his poetic fate were misplaced, but even this central poet of the English canon took a few years to achieve his acknowledged place.

A Great History Book

I just finished Diamaird MacCulloch’s The Reformation: A History. It is what its title indicates: a history of the reformation…from just before the Martin Luther’s revolution to around 1700. If you think that that is a boring read, you would be wrong, because MacCulloch has crafted a fine history. This highly detailed book is a fantastic and easy read. MacCulloch takes us across Europe, from Spain’s Counter-Reformation hysteria to the Holy Roman Empire’s slow rollback of Protestant gains to Poland’s out-of-the-character-of-the-times toleration to England’s unique take on Protestantism – even to the New World.

MacCulloch is able to break down the finer points of theology with great clarity and without bogging the narrative down, for as he rightly points out, the finer points are frequently what the Reformation were over: What is the presence of God in the Eucharist? Transubantiation such as the Catholics would suggest or symbolism as Huldrych Zwingli proposed? Or something in between?

MacCulloch is also able to avoid getting involved in detailed political discussions except as they relate to theological or other Reformation topics. Additionally, instead of getting lost in the grand campaigning of the murderous Thirty Years’ War, MacCulloch notes the fact of the destruction and the ultimate triumph of the Catholic armies.

Finally, MacCulloch’s tangents about the persecution of witches or evolution of manners and discipline are equally enjoyable and well written. Every page seems to offer a new revelation, and after finishing this masterpiece of modern history, I felt that I had learned several volumes worth of history.