The Empire Builder

         “What would you do if you had all of the time in the world and money wasn’t as issue?  You would travel, right?”  That is the line that I used to give my students and I said it so often because I really meant it.  Now that I am retired, these trips mean even more to me because they take up so much emotional energy and they give me a reason to keep myself in shape.  They give me something to look forward to as I allow myself to become truly excited about travel.  And besides, I can hear the clock ticking in the back of my brain and it is telling me that I only have so much time to do these trips so I had better go while I am still young enough, and strong enough, to endure them.

Monday. November 20: Vancouver
        You just have to appreciate it when everything goes right when you travel and I was firing on all cylinders on my first day.  The Uber arrived at 4:00 am, my flight took off at 6:50, and I was on the light rail to Vancouver’s waterfront area before noon.  Like Baudelaire’s flaneur, a bourgeois who walked the streets of Paris for pleasure, I walked to the harbor, to Gastown, and to Granville Island in one afternoon.  It was a six mile walk and I was carrying a full backpack but I didn’t mind because the weather was perfect and there was so much to look at.  Still, at the age of 61, I was very proud of my vigor because this had been a long, hard day.

Tuesday. November 21: Capilano Bridge
        Our tour guide for the day was Byron and he led us around the major attractions in the area for eight hours.  Our first stop was Stanley Park, which overlooks Vancouver, and contains over 1,000 acres of open space.  It also includes over five miles of sidewalks for bikes and walkers.  After lunch on Granville Island, a tourist area known for its boutiques and restaurants, we drove to the Capilano Bridge.  The bridge and the cliff walk overlook a deep canyon and Christmas lights were strung up everywhere for the season.  It starts getting dark at about 3:30 in Vancouver so we got to see the lights in all of their glory.  Our luck held out in that it didn’t start to rain until our tour was finished and I was thankful for a great day with a really good tour guide.

Wednesday. November 22: Seattle
        I ran out of things to do so I walked part of the sea wall, or the seventeen mile long sidewalk that encircles Vancouver, before getting on the bus to Seattle.  After a five hour bus ride, which took a lot longer than usual because of traffic and long lines at immigration, I boarded “The Empire Builder,” or Amtraks’ line between Seattle and Minneapolis, where I relaxed in my private compartment before going to the restaurant car for dinner.
        Because there is only a limited staff with a limited amount of tables in the dining car, passengers are expected to share a table and I had three dinner companions.  Michelle was from Guangzhou and studied public relations in Boston.  She was traveling by herself so we bonded over that experience.  There was a man named Friday who was an engineer from Nigeria and currently works for Boeing.  Both Friday and Michelle had such thick accents that I could barely understand what they were saying.  Dr. Jocelyn is married to Friday and is a university teacher and a therapist for people who have experienced trauma in their lives.  The conversation centered on young people and the isolation that they feel because they spend too much time on their iPhones.  Our conversation took a bad turn when I mentioned that my only goals are to take care of myself so that I could continue to travel.  Dr. Jocelyn said that she “didn’t know what to make of a person who didn’t have any goals.”  I tried to explain that I had been a teacher for 35 years and participated in eleven Ironman competitions so I was pretty much done with setting high goals for myself.

Thursday. November 23: Thanksgiving on “The Empire Builder”
        I am embarrassed that I have to continually relearn the same lesson of “do not judge a book by its cover.”  When Mark and Jana sat down next to me for breakfast they were both wearing old sweatshirts and looked like they had just finished doing their morning chores on the farm.  My first impressions were totally wrong.  As it turns out, Mark is a news anchor and producer for a television station in Spokane and Jana is a conservator who manages the personal and financial affairs of old people who can no longer fend for themselves.  We spent an hour together talking about travel, our children, and our jobs.  It was wonderful to have such bright and engaging people to share my breakfast with.
        On the other hand, Thanksgiving dinner didn’t go well at all.  I shared it with a family of three; Kirby and her two children, Chris and Ari.  They claimed that they had driven twenty hours to Spokane to spend the holiday with their extended family but things went so badly that they abandoned their weekend and took a train back to Fort Wayne.  No one wanted to talk about what happened and, while the kids seemed indifferent to the disastrous Thanksgiving, the mother was clearly still angry.  When I tried to engage them in conversation, Kirby quietly seethed, Chris was thirteen years old and could only mumble a reply, and ten year old Ari was too concerned with her iPhone to look up and talk to me.  She did make it a point to burp loudly throughout the meal.  My thought was that this family of three will always remember the Thanksgiving dinner that they shared with a complete stranger on an Amtrak train.

Friday. November 24: Saint Paul 
        I shared my last meal on the train with James, an obviously gay young man who resides in Alaska.  He was gifted a thirty day pass on Amtrak and was determined to see the country by riding the rails.  James was genuinely interested when I told him about my many travels on the train and he took notes in his iPad when I said that the Salt Lake trip was the best because it was so pretty.  The conversation was going well when suddenly James said that he had enjoyed talking with me and then abruptly left.  He was an introvert and he wanted to go back to his cabin to do some crafting.  Amtrak is perfect for people like James because they don’t have to talk to anyone, if they don’t want to, and they can retreat into their private space any time that they want to be alone.
        I got off of the train after breakfast and started to walk; anxious to shrug off my two days on “The Empire Builder” but fully recovered from the Vancouver part of my trip.  This will be my last ride on Amtrak.  I enjoyed watching the snow fall on the mountains of Montana and the gentle rocking of my compartment as we logged the miles through the northwest part of America.  However, I have done all of the interesting lines that Amtrak has to offer and since I don’t believe in repeating any vacation experience, it is time to branch out and try some new things.
        I had to improvise because I thought that the train was letting me off in Minneapolis but in reality the station is in Saint Paul.  The capitol of Minnesota and the history museum were not on my list of things to do, but they were an easy walk from where I was let off, so I decided to take a risk and visit these two places.  Half of the fun of taking these trips is to post about them on Facebook so I took a lot of pictures of the statues outside of the capitol and of the exhibits in the history museum.  After I finished my morning in Saint Paul I took the light rail to Minneapolis where I toured the Mill City Museum and the famous sculpture garden.  All of the major attractions in the Twin Cities, like the Stone Arch Bridge, are outside and it was freezing outside.  When I checked in at the front desk at my hotel I told the clerk that I couldn’t feel my fingers because they were so cold.  They had literally turned blue.  I just couldn’t get warm so when I went to bed I piled all of my clothes and extra pillows on top of me to provide some extra warmth.  I wish that I could say that I am exaggerating but the cold really was that bad.

Saturday. November 25: Minneapolis
        I hadn’t showered or changes clothes in two days because I had been on the train.  Feeling like a new man after some serious self-care, I boarded the light rail and was ready to visit some new attractions.  Minnehaha Falls was beautiful because it was most frozen over and only a trickle of water was coming out.  The whole of the falls was covered in ice.  Fort Snelling was nothing more than a stone wall with a turret in the middle.  To call it a fort is to give it a glory that it does not deserve because it was really just a muster station during the world wars and the area is known now as a “park and ride” station for the train.  To help break up the day, I signed up for a “Pedal Pub Tour” of the downtown area but it was cancelled with absolutely no notice.  Suddenly, I had the whole afternoon free.  The only major attraction that I had not seen was “The Mall of America” but I didn’t want to go there because I had such good memories of taking the kids to the mall when they where young.  Since I didn’t see any options, I took the light rail for a half hour ride out to the mall.  The thing is, if you take away the indoor amusement park, “The Mall of America” is just a mall and, after a brief visit, I took the light rail back to downtown Minneapolis.
        A word on the light rail.  I thought that it would be a cheap way for me to ride to the local attractions, which it was, but it also draws the worst elements of society.  The homeless made me feel uncomfortable, but there was also a group of young men playing their music on a boom box as loudly as possible in the back of the train.  It was if they were trying to convince everyone that they were having a great time at an impromptu party.  Another man became defiant when told by the conductor told him to stop smoking his JUUL.  Instead of putting the vaping device away, the man angrily and dramatically continued to blow smoke.  I saw young men and old men trying to hustle each other but what left a lasting impression was the mentally handicapped man who suddenly wanted off of the train.  He started to howl like a wolf and then flung himself on his back, arms and legs flailing, until he could crawl out of the door at the next stop.  When I feel threatened, as I most certainly did on the light rail, I have a few simple rules that I follow: do not engage, do not make eye contact, do not smile, and get up and move if there is anything that makes me feel uncomfortable.  I followed all of those rules when I rode the Minneapolis METRO light rail system for two days.  

Sunday. November 26: 4836 12th Avenue South
        I lingered in the hotel breakfast room for four hours because I couldn’t face the thought of walking around outside in the freezing cold again.  To kill some time, I made a TikTok about how Minneapolis was a complete disappointment and how scary the light rail system was to me.  All of the attractions in the city were outside and it was twenty degrees outside so no one should vacation in the Twin Cities if it were not summer.  Apparently, being bitter sells because my video had over 4,500 views.  I checked out of the hotel, slung my backpack over my shoulder, and met with Dan, my guide for a three hour tour of the downtown area.  It was a really good tour and afterwards I went to visit my grandparents’ house.  I had arranged a tour with the current owners, Mark and Jill, and I asked my cousin, Kathy, to join me because she had grown up in the house.  Mark brightened up when I told him that my sole purpose in coming to Minneapolis was to see the house, which was true, and he spent three hours showing off the changes that he had made.  I think that he really enjoyed hearing Kathy and reminisce over our fond memories of the house.  It was a nice way to end my trip.


        Was it worth it?  I put a lot of time into planning this trip and a lot of emotional energy into anticipating my time on the road.  I understand why some people don’t travel because it is such a pain in the neck to do.  And while no single part of the trip, Vancouver or Amtrak or Minneapolis, was worth it, in the aggregate it was a really good vacation.  Besides, there are tangential benefits.  I have gained a lot of confidence by having a plan come through and have learned how to improvise when the plan fails me.  Also, being on a hard trip makes me appreciate my wife even more and our marriage has been strengthened because I have come to realize what a great life I have.  Finally, one of the reasons as to why I love doing these trips is because there is always the possibility that something could go wrong.  Who knew, for example, that my most vivid memory would be of the crazy homeless man who threw himself on his back and began to howl, all the while flailing his arms and legs.  I will never forget him.   

Addendum
• I love being a chameleon on these trips, meaning that I can fit in anywhere.  I can be at a five star hotel in Vancouver one night and then be sleeping on the top bunk in a compartment on an Amtrak train on the next night.
• I love it when the people that I meet have a bad first impression of me.  Because I always wear jeans and a sweatshirt, and when I as carrying my backpack on a walking trip, people underestimate me.  But when I mention that I did the Ironman eleven times, have written three books, taught for thirty five years, and have been to Egypt and South Africa; their opinion of me quickly changes.
• I like to tip well, especially for the guides who work so hard to make a tour interesting even though they have been to the same sites many times before.  (Byron in Vancouver, Dan in Minneapolis)
• Tracey and I have the time, money, and desire to do these trips.  Out of these three things, it will probably be our desire which leaves us first.
• I cannot help but feel that my time is limited to do these trips, that I should do as much as possible as soon as possible.  I have no basis for this feeling but am probably remembering the early deaths of Tod Knight and Mike Triebsch.
• “Watch while no one else is looking!”  This means that I am an older man whom nobody is going to notice so I can fade in the background, observe other people and places, then take notes so that I can journal about them later.
• I prefer to take the walking trips alone because they are so hard but I do get tired of people asking me why I am alone and where is my wife?  There is always a mixture of judgement and pity when other people ask me these questions
• I must continue to make new memories because, if I don’t, I give my old memories too much space in my head.

12th Avenue South

         The house at 12th Avenue South is important to me because it contains my very first memory.  While the rest of the family went to Aunt Jean’s wedding reception, I was packed away in the second floor bedroom because I was too young to go out.  I remember that the room was almost magical, which is why I remember it, because it was filled with wedding presents and one wall held fish netting that Jean had sown seashells into.  I slept on the floor that night but usually the Frazier kids sacked out in the basement together and I remember playing with Jean’s guitar until the strings broke off of it.

        My only strong memory of my grandmother is when we were alone in her kitchen and she made me a peanut butter and honey sandwich.  It was the best sandwich that I have ever had because Grandma made it just for me and, while I ate it, she gave me her full and undivided attention as she talked to me at the dining room table.  It made me feel special because I was a shy boy and I don’t think that I said a word during this whole interchange.  After I finished my lunch, Grandma put me in front of the television in the living room to watch “Bob Terry and His Pirates” while she cleaned up.  I don’t remember why we were at the house by ourselves but our brief time together makes for a nice memory for me.  My eyes tear up a little when I think back on my lunch with Grandma.

        There are so many memories of the house because we used to visit Grandma and Grandpa there about once a year when I was very young.  I remember the entryway into the living room because that is where the David Frazier family stood awkwardly, all five of them, as we met our cousins for the first time.  It felt a little forced because I think that our parents were expecting us to immediately embrace each other but instead we spent the first few minutes sizing each other up.  It was in that exact same entrance where my cousin, Kathy, mistook Chris Wagoner for me when we rode our bicycles through Minneapolis on our cross country trip in 1978.  It was in the living room where Grandpa kept his pipes on the table in front of the fireplace.  Kathy said that Grandpa had three telephones and a teletype machine in the basement so that he could work from home as a dispatcher for American Commercial Barge Lines.  When he needed a break from work he would grab a pipe from the stand and then go outside to pull some weeds while smoking it.

        The house on 12th Avenue is owned by a couple named Mark and Jill.  I had written them to ask if I could drop by to take some pictures and they not only agreed but they ended up giving us a three hour tour.  Kathy, who had grown up in the house, joined me for the visit.  It was so nice to know that the house had been bought by a responsible owner who has taken good care of it.  Mark has done a lot of remodeling, including an addition to the second floor and putting French doors in the dining room that open up to a new patio.  These changes make the place look a lot bigger and brighter than I remember it.  The sidewalk, where we had set our creations made out of the clay that we had dug up from the creek bed, had been replaced and all of the landscaping had been redone.  Only the basement had remained unchanged and Kathy pointed to the jars that Grandpa had nailed to the ceiling to have a convenient place to store his nuts and bolts.  Finally, Kathy was proud that Mark and Jill had taken some of her artwork that had been stored in the attic and had displayed it in the office and the living room.