Hello friends! It is a cooooooold early morning in Chicago as I write this. We’ve had two warm lovely jacket-less days here, but now overnight Chicago suddenly decided to start behaving like Chicago in winter. This is partly why we’re schlepping so many bags; we needed to have clothes for both the warmer south and now the colder north. Here’s the update:
We were late getting into Lynchburg, Virginia, so our short visit with a friend there at the station was even shorter than expected. But it was a good visit. Very kind of him to come see us just for an hour. We took the next train into Roanoke just a short hour and a quarter ride. No sleepers on this train, so we sat in Business Class. Plenty of leg room and not many other people. We kept our masks on.
Dad, still driving at 97, met us at the Roanoke train station, which is really more of a wide place in the rails. There is a nice platform and an extended shelter with some benches, but no station building. But at least Amtrak is going into Roanoke now, a few years ago the closest station was Lynchburg.
We spent a lovely week with Dad in Roanoke working jigsaw puzzles, eating ice cream, making each other laugh, playing our favorite silly little card game, and listening to Dad stubbornly insist he can take care of himself and doesn’t need any help with anything. My sister, Myra, flew in on Monday and stayed until Friday.
We didn’t do much outside the house other than get groceries. We did make it up to “The Star” on Mill Mountain thanks to a wrong turn as we left the ice cream store. The Star is a Roanoke landmark, a huge neon star at the top of the local “mountain” overlooking the city. (No offense, Virginia, but In Oregon where “mountain” means it takes all day to drive around and it has snow on top, Mill Mountain would be called a hill.)
On Friday we packed up several boxes of stuff we don’t need to carry with us anymore and sent them home to Portland. I’m still trying to figure out why we are still schlepping six pieces of luggage. Whatever.
Dad put us back on the train Sunday morning and we bid Roanoke farewell. Riding in Business Class again, we came into Washington DC a few hours later. I was able to snap a picture of the Washington Monument from the train. Our friend, Jessy, met us at the station for a “drive-by” visit. Good to see her and catch up. We sat in the lounge and chatted until our next train.
We are of the age when we’d rather pay for assistance than lug all our bags, so we requested a Red Cap and got a gentleman named Harvey who loaded us into his little cart and drove us down the platform. We got settled in our now familiar cozy roomette (no toilet in this one, more like the first one) and pretended to look over the menu. Amtrak does not cater to anyone with food allergies, so our options are limited and we already knew what we wanted.
Next stop – Chicago!
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Adrian Dee, flutist, composer 