Day 13: SATURDAY

Full day on the train today. The time change is still messing me up a bit; Alaska is three hours earlier than Indiana, so as we go east we keep losing time. A loss of three hours in as many days is kind of jarring.

Last night was even more ridiculous than I recorded, because as it turns out, David the attendant has only been doing this for about a month, and apparently hasn't quite figured out how the beds work. I noticed, when trying to squirm into my bunk around 1 a.m., that the vertical metal strut that attaches one end of the bed to the ceiling wasn't hooked. I figured this was just an oversight (though a major one, since only one end of the bed was supported), so I wrestled with it and finally got it latched properly.

This morning, I call David in to make up our beds and convert them back into seats. He slowly arranges the mattresses, folds them up, puts everything on the top bunk, and pushes on the bunk to stow it. Nothing happens.

Push.

Push.

He goes to check between the bed and the door to make sure something's not wedged between them. Nope, nothing wrong there.

Push.

Push.

Nothing happens.

At this point, I feel obligated to point out the big metal pole at the end of the bunk. “It's still latched on this end,” I say, pointing to the brace.

David turns and stares at the strut for a few seconds as if he's never seen it before. Finally, he goes over and pushes on it a few times, and after several tries gets it to fold down so the bed can be stowed.

Needless to say, this does not fill me with confidence...

Anyway, aside from that, today has been pretty normal. I spent part of the morning napping, since I didn't sleep well last night, and most of the afternoon blogging or reading Loki. We've done a little photographing and scenery-watching, too. We went through the Cascades yesterday, and this morning we passed through Glacier National Park again. We've also seen lots of cattle, a fair number of horses, some wild pronghorns, and a pretty cool ghost town.

Laura and I got out at Havre and danced a little to get the blood flowing. (On the way west, we got out at Havre and did DDR steps from memory to get our daily exercise in.) This time we were doing swing, though we had to quit and get back on the train shortly after we started. I already miss Leah and Patrick's daily dance sessions...

It's now a little after 4:30 local time, which is 5:36 Indiana time (we're changing time zones again this evening). Dinner is in either one or two hours, depending on when we actually change times. I've already had two large meals, and I've done nothing but sit around all day. I absolutely don't need to eat again.

Day 12: FRIDAY (addendum)

Okay, it's finally happened. We have Broken. It always happens at least once on every vacation, and this time, it culminated in fifteen minutes of Mom and me convulsed in breathless, tear-streaming laughter. It's been that kind of day, and one thing after another has happened, so it figured that there would have to be some kind of tension release.

We were discussing whether or not to try to track down the attendant to have him make up our beds, when the roses fell over again, right onto Dad's seat. Dad, mouth full of the pills he was trying to swallow at the time, began making desperate squawking noises that sounded a lot like “Mmmmmmmmph! Mmmmph-mmmph! MMMMMMMPPPHHH!” and which I accurately translated (thanks to the flapping motions of his arms) as “Towel! Towel!”

Of course, Dad's clothes had just about dried from the last incident when this happened. He, the pillow, and the seat were now thoroughly soaked. Two of our towels were damp as well.

Mom and I had finally reached the point of ridiculous returns, and were laughing too hard to help him blot the puddles. We then sent Dad (who was the only one wearing shoes, and train rules require shoes at all times in public areas) to fetch David, the car attendant. When he arrived we shoved Dad out in the hall to make room, while I (sitting in the only chair, and trapped in the room by luggage) became a depository for all the things that had been stacked on the bed. Mom balanced against the wall next to me, trying to stay out of the way and keep luggage from falling off of my lap while Daniel set up the bed. We were both still laughing.

Of course, things couldn't happen normally from this point on. Mom had calmed down enough to make conversation, and she happened to comment on how the previous train's berth had had a tendency to jostle itself back up into the seat position while they were trying to sleep on it. In fact, on the last train, she fell out of bed because it shifted so much. So, of course, as the attendant tries to set up the bed, it keeps popping right back up into the vertical seat back, looking suspiciously like a catapult. This set us off all over again, and we were laughing too hard to explain to David what was happening.

Finally, David took our one remaining dry towel and, while leaning on the bed with three limbs to keep it in place, wedged the towel between the seat and the wall to keep it from bouncing up again. So far, it's working. (Incidentally, this is also the technique that we and other passengers have been using to keep the walls between the adjoining compartments from rattling...)

This left us with only two pillows and no towels, so David brought us new ones and then fled before we could do any more damage. (By the way, we still have only two bottled waters.)

Dad came back, and we had to recap the whole ridiculous scene for him, which set off another fit of laughing. And then, when we finally had ourselves back under control... the neighbor's toilet began to flush. Repeatedly. Four times, I think, in a period of about three minutes (how many people are in that room?!).

I can't explain exactly why that's funny, but it is. Especially if you're in this room, discussing the downstairs toilets that have built-in fans in the wrong places, and questioning whether or not the bathrooms in your car are possessed, when it flushes with a rocket-engine sound through the wall beside your head.

So, anyway, we're back to (relative) normality now. But we're still prone to fits of giggles every time the passengers in room E flush their toilet. Somehow, I can't help feeling that I've wandered into a Marx Brothers movie.

Shoot, Mom just did it again. Sitting in the same seat where the last two water mishaps happened, she opened a bottle of water and took a drink... and managed to pour a copious amount of it down her front.

It's that seat, I'm telling you. It's haunted by a kappa. Just like the downstairs toilets.

Day 12: FRIDAY

I miss Vladimir. I miss Mahajir. I miss Patrick and Leah.

Oh, and this train is haunted.

More on that later, though. I'll begin at the beginning, which was obscenely early this morning.

Due to a time change and disembarkation procedures, we had to be up at some ungodly hour this morning when my body thought it was supposed to be asleep. I had stayed up late the previous night to pack and fill out the requisite shipboard and customs forms, so I was pretty much ready (though rather loath) to go. I woke up a little before seven (which was five, by my internal clock), got dressed, threw my last few things in my computer bag and went down to meet everyone for breakfast. We had our carry-on bags with us, as well as the gorgeous red roses that Vladimir gave us the night of the midnight buffet (they made it through customs okay, and are currently traveling with us in a plastic water bottle wedged against the wall of the train compartment).

Because of our stateroom level, we had priority disembarkation, so we didn't have to wait long before we were called to exit the ship, go through immigration and customs and claim our luggage. We had said most of our farewells to Vladimir and the rest of our service staff the night before, since we knew we wouldn't see them before we disembarked. Patrick was manning the gangway, and we stopped and said goodbye to him, too. I had Jon take a photo, which I will post with the rest whenever we get the chance to dump all the photos onto the computers and sort them (some weeks from now, I suspect)...

We left the ship a little after 9 a.m., and our train wasn't scheduled to leave until 4:30 or so, which gave us another afternoon to play around Seattle. We spent a large part of it sitting in an outdoor park (it was actually installation artwork – a fountain and benches constructed from large chunks of pillow basalt, commemorating the Pleistocene era in the Pacific northwest – and no, I'm not making that up. Seattle is SUCH an artsy city. I'd absolutely love to live there if it didn't rain so much). The time we were not sitting in the park we spent across the intersection in Uwajimaya, one of the largest Asian markets in the country. It contains a full-sized grocery, a huge food court, a Kinokuniya bookstore, a gift shop, and more.

Yes, you may have noticed the danger here. I had a six-hour layover in a place with a Kinokuniya bookstore. Wheeeee!

Actually, I think I showed remarkable restraint (mostly due to the size of my carry-on bag). I bought only three Copic markers and two volumes of Matantei Loki, and I bought those only because Mag GARDEN won't license the first series for English-language distribution and I wanted to read them in order and have the full background for Matantei Loki Ragnarok. (I also flipped through some current periodicals, like the Japanese Playstation magazine. I found some new screenshots from Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus that I hadn't yet seen, although I'm sure they're all over the gaming sites by now. There's a great shot of Cloud and Kadaj, which is also a major spoiler. By the time the movie comes out this fall, nothing will be a surprise. We will have seen every stinking scene in the magazines and trailers!)

Of course, there was also the Asian grocery, where I bought, in addition to lunch and snacks, four bottles of Ramune and five boxes of Pocky (multiple varieties). Out of curiosity, Laura and I split a sweet red bean roll* from the bakery, and WOW. I have never tasted anything that sweet in my life – not even the super-lux cruise ship desserts I've been eating all week. It's like eating crystallized honey. As Laura (bouncing mid-air at the time) exclaimed, this certainly explains a lot about Gokuu's personality! What a sugar buzz.

Around 3:45 we headed back to King Station, and boarded the train around 45 minutes later. After the morning's hassles, we were looking forward to a chance to relax, sit back, perhaps stretch out and take a nap after the short night's sleep... Little did we know what awaited us, or we might have done our relaxing beforehand. /sigh/ Did I mention that the train is haunted?

The first and most troubling problem involved Laura and Jon's tickets. Through some mishap, they had tickets for July 4, not July 1, and so their compartment was double-booked. Since the sleeper cars were sold out, they were told that there was no place for them on the train. This meant that they had to either pay for another set of tickets and ride in coach, or get off the train and try to make their own arrangements to get home.

This was not helped by the fact that the surly conductor, Alexander, was doing everything in his power to complicate the problem. He confiscated their tickets and wouldn't even give them back so Laura and Jon could call a travel agent. (He *still* has the tickets; he didn't even give them stubs, which are their only proof that they paid for a sleeper, and they should have the stubs even if they'd used the tickets.) First he was going to put them off the train; then he offered to give them coach seats, to which they agreed. However, he took their original tickets and then informed them (after the train had already left the station) that by staying on the train, they had also agreed to forfeit the cost of their original sleeper tickets, as well as the two days' worth of meals and service that they'd paid for.

Laura didn't take that too well.

An hour later, after a number of phone calls, discussions, haggling, and MUCH frustration and hair-pulling, the word came down that the conductor, lo and behold, DID have a compartment open in the next car, and if they would pay an upgrade fee of $87, they could use it. (We're still trying to figure out what the “upgrade fee” was; Laura theorizes that it was the difference in fares between the rate at which they booked, and the more expensive rates charged at time of departure.)

Anyway, Jon paid the difference, and now they have a place to sleep. But I'm sure that Amtrak will be hearing about the trouble they went through, and the distinct lack of service on board. Especially from the conductor. (He was rude to us, too.)

That was the first of many small catastrophes. On the way west, we had a wonderful attendant named Patrick (no relation to the dancer) who anticipated our every need, and answered calls almost before we made them. Unfortunately, our sleeper car attendant on this trip, David, is not Patrick. He does not answer calls (we pulled the call button, waited ten minutes, watched him go by the room twice without responding, and finally gave up). The first thing we did when he introduced himself was ask him for a third bottle of water, since we had three people. He said, “Certainly. If you need more water, you can just let me know.” We still, as of 11:00 p.m., have only two bottles of water.

Not all of the trip's problems can be blamed on the train's staff, though. The downstairs toilets are also evil. One of them doesn't flush. Okay, I can understand a malfunction or mechanical failure; those things happen. However, toilets are NOT supposed to have an electric eye installed in the toilet bowl to have a high-powered fan blow on your backside every time the beam is broken. (That's our theory, anyway. There's certainly something weird going on with that one!)

Actually, all of the plumbing is kind of strange. We're in a more recent sleeper car than we were on the last trip, and these new sinks have push-button faucets, presumably for purposes of water conservation so you can't leave the water on too long. The problem with this is, they are not set to shut off right away... so you can push the button, lather and rinse your hands, walk to the other side of a room, get a cup, come back and fill it, and the water is still running. How is this conserving water, exactly?

Our biggest problem with water, though, has nothing to do with the plumbing. It has to do with Vladimir's roses. They're currently residing in a water bottle, the only convenient travel container that would hold three stemmed flowers. So far, they had traveled pretty well since leaving the stateroom, through breakfast on the ship (they made a nice centerpiece), through customs, in a taxi, on the luggage cart, through the train station, into the checked baggage room (yes, we checked the roses briefly while we ran around town) and then onto the train. When we got to our room, we put them in the table drink holder alongside the window The problem is, the roses are just a little top-heavy, and trains tend to go around corners... which means that the makeshift vase will randomly tip over, soaking the pants of whoever happens to be sitting next to it.

Mom was the first victim. Dad was the second. So far, I've managed to avoid the ire of the water bottle, mostly because I've been sitting in the chair on the other side of the compartment. (Although I did have a couple of things fall on my head from the luggage rack above my chair, so maybe it balances out.)

For the most part, I've been vegging since we got here. I spent the first hour or so reading Loki, and I think I'm actually doing pretty well with the translation (it's aimed at younger teenagers, so it's an easier reading level, and it has phonetic hiragana next to all the kanji I don't know). Then we went to dinner; it was New York Strip for me this time. Not bad – typical restaurant quality – but disappointing by comparison to what we've been eating all week. Plus, I really, really miss Vladimir. He would always tell me exactly what was good in the kitchen, and which items he thought I would like best. He would bring me extra entrees or desserts to sample if I couldn't make up my mind. He always knew exactly how I wanted my meat cooked. He would flit around behind our chairs and silently exchange the flatware. And he was just generally perfect, which is a really hard transition to make to a harried train waitress who doesn't know you and is trying to service eight tables at once.

After dinner, I brought what was left of my can of Pepsi and my Chocolate Bombe back to the compartment and started typing, which is where you find me now.

The dessert, at least, is good. It's almost like the cups of chocolate mousse that the waiters used to bring around after meals on deck 11...

* A soft bun stuffed with youkan, usually seen disappearing down the gullet of a ravenous anime character such as Usagi, Lirin, Son Gokuu or Miaka.