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The Family Room by Michelle Martin

April 13, 2008

A slow train to … where?

Adventure is good.

It builds flexibility and resourcefulness and patience and all kinds of good character traits.

Any travel, especially in these post-9/11 days and especially with children, has the potential to become an adventure.

All things I should have reminded myself on a corner in Reno, Nev., at 3 a.m. on a Friday with my husband, two children and eight pieces of luggage of various sizes.

We got there on Amtrak’s California Zephyr, the train that runs from Chicago to Emoryville, Calif., just across the bay from San Francisco. We planned to make the 55-hour train trip as part of spring break, following up with three days in San Francisco before flying home.

To me, 53 hours on the train seemed a bit much, but Frank loves trains and we had a family sleeping compartment, so I thought I could handle it.

Turns out, though, that we spent nearly 63 hours on the train—and only made it Reno.

Everything started to go wrong on Wednesday, the day after we boarded. We pulled into the station at Granby, Colo., in late morning. We didn’t leave until evening, because of a rock slide in a canyon up ahead.

That eight-hour delay meant we were traveling though areas of heavy freight traffic way off schedule, and we kept getting sidelined to allow freight trains to pass. The freight companies own the tracks, after all.

But as delay piled on delay, it became clear that the earliest we would reach Emoryville would be Friday morning. Still OK with us; we would just spend Thursday night on the train instead of a hotel.

But by 6 or 7 p.m. Thursday, the conductors announced that the train would stop in Reno, so that it could get cleaned up and start back to Chicago the next day. Buses were to take the passengers over the Sierra Nevada mountains, after meeting us in Reno at about 11 p.m.

But then there were more delays. Our engineer and crew had run out of hours, so we had to wait for replacements. Then an engine inspection found a problem with a ladder hitting a wheel on the front engine. For some reason, that was not acceptable on the front engine, but OK for the second engine, so the two engines had to switch places. To do that, we had to wait for all the freight traffic to pass.

Of course, no one announced that. We just found out because my husband went looking for information. Fortunately, he returned before they disconnected the engines, cutting off power, making it impossible to move between cars and marooning us in the dark for two hours with no sign of the attendants.

After all that, the idea of getting on a bus with no food, no water and one bathroom to go over the mountains in the wee hours of the morning seemed a little much. So we abandoned the train, hailed a cab (within about 30 seconds of reaching that street corner at 3 a.m.) and found a hotel room for the rest of the night.

The next day, we rented a car and drove over the mountains, reveling in the scenery that we would have missed the night before. And through it all, Frank and Caroline were troupers, with no meltdowns and remarkably few complaints.

By the way, San Francisco was great. And Frank wants to take the train to Los Angeles next year.

Martin is assistant editor of the Catholic New World. Contact her at [email protected].