The delay on this post is excused by it’s content.

Word to the wise… Don’t injure yourself in a manner carrying the possibility of a neck or back injury. C-collars suck.

Saturday noon-thirty-ish. I went to my parent’s house to ride my mum’s horse for her.

A little background on the situation: My mum’s horse has been acting up. Girl horse. Mare. She’s been doing some strange things recently. For example, she’s normally a pretty calm horse and lately, for no reason at all, she’s been rearing up on her hind legs when people try to take her outside. She’s been biting at people. Not too long ago, she ripped out of my mum’s hands and rushed over to another mare’s stall and started making man-noises at her. My mum added it all together, and remembered that a certain ovarian tumor can cause excess testosterone, which can cause every one of these problems… Which is to say, male horses have all these problems naturally, and with this problem, mares can end up with a little man in the brain. And also have all these these problems.

The veterinarian was scheduled to come check her out sometime around 1pm.

So I get on her and the ride was going very well. One of the people boarding horses at our house showed up with a young horse and had him in the ring with me, and he was being skittish and my mum’s mare was hardly paying attention. All in all, we were have a really good ride. So I ask her to canter, and she acted a little frustrated, which isn’t all that abnormal, and I braced myself for her to do a little hopping, and out of absolutely nowhere, she stands straight up on her hind legs.

And flips over.

On me.

It’s a damn strange memory. I can imagine it probably looked pretty spectacular from the ground. I had braced myself for her to buck, which puts her hindquarter up in the air, which puts me bracing towards her back. Instead she stood straight up on her hind legs. I’m suddenly barely holding on to the reins and rocketing for the ground. I remember the impact, and remember losing consciousness. I came to and acted on instinct, trying to get away from the last place I remember the horse being. I physically couldn’t get up. I scrambled around on the ground, my body just wasn’t capable of responding. After a couple of tries, the girl who works in the barn was next to me, and I figured that the horse couldn’t be too dangerously close. So I stopped moving. Face down in the sand, arms tucked under me, my head held up by my helmet.

mum called 911. My dad came outside. Everyone was gathered around me, kept asking me questions: “What day is it?” “Where are you?” “What is your birthday?” I often don’t know what day it is, heh. They put a couple of horse blankets on me to keep me warm. I didn’t feel cold, but they said I’d get cold and the last thing they needed was for me to end up with hypothermia on top of everything else. I just wanted to lay there. They kept asking me if I could wiggle my toes. Whether I could move my legs. Could move one ok, the other one hurt like a sonofabitch, and I wasn’t going to try moving it. I had brought my dog with me, and asked what had been done with him. I bought him a collapsible porta-house, but I knew he’d probably get frantic after a while, and start scratching at it. It’s soft-sided. I asked if someone could go put him in the spare bathroom. They kept talking about how they would probably have to cut my boots off. And I kept asking them to take them off. They wouldn’t. Riding boots are expensive, and these were a pair of my mum’s old boots. There weren’t really any more sitting around and I sure didn’t have money to buy more. Eh. Nothing I could do about it now. I definitely couldn’t get down there to get them off. Riding pants are expensive too. Could only hope for the best.

A sheriff arrived first. See, my parent’s live in a fairly rural area. There’s no town police, only county sheriffs, and no local ambulance service. He moved the blankets off of me and began asking me about where it hurt and how bad. Started checking my hips and such, asking how badly it hurt. Asking if I can wiggle my toes. Ambulance showed up eventually, though they went to the house across the street, which is also a horse farm with a big brown barn, but it made it’s way back to our barn. By this time, I realised just how much the blankets had been keeping me warm. I started shivering pretty violently. Moving anything at all hurt pretty badly, and the tightening of my muscles was hurting even more. They came in with the backboard and the c-collar. It was fairly obviously determined that one of the EMTs was Irish. This is a good thing. I like Irish people. “We’re going to roll you onto the board, just relax.” Being that I didn’t think I had any problems with the upper half, I put out my hand to help myself roll back. “No, don’t help!” Heh… It’s hard not to help with something like that when some of my limbs felt fine. Anyway, onto the board, into the velcro. They wrapped the c-collar around my neck and slapped the foam supporters on either side of my head. They held it all in place with tape wrapped all the way around the board on my head, top and neck area. I remember them making some kind of joke… “She didn’t even hear us… This time we’ll go for the eyebrows…” Some tape joke, I guess. I really didn’t hear the first thing they said, heh. They finished wrapping me up. “You’re going to feel like you’re floating here…” They lifted me up onto the gurney, strapped me in and rolled me out to the ambulance. “Bit of a bump…” and inside.

Turns out every ambulance in a reasonable radius was out. That’s actually a pretty significant number. I guess Saturday was the day to injure yourself. The ambulance that came for me was at an accident something like 15 miles away. It took them less than 13 minutes to get to our house from the time that the call was placed. Not bad for all surface streets, half of which was through a semi-residential area.

The sheriff got into the ambulance with me. I asked if they had any eyedrops. “That’s one thing we don’t carry.” There was dirt all over me and some of it was getting into my eyes, which are easily irritated by sand and the like. I tried to remember to close my eyes when they moved around over me. They turned up the heat and got my mum into the front seat. The Irish EMT got in and got me a blanket. He felt my hands, realised how cold I had gotten and put a nice, soft blanket on me and handed me some liquid plastic packet of warmth. It was a lot like the ice packs that you smack on something to break the packet inside and mix the ingredients. Only hot. .I remember that they must have made another joke, because they both stopped and looked at me. “Tough croud,” says the Irish guy. “Is this thing on?” says the sheriff, pretending to tap on a microphone. The Irish EMT asked me how attached to my shirt I was. Lucky for me, as much as I liked it, it was the least important thing I was wearing… Although I got the impression that I didn’t really have a choice in the matter anyway. He got out a needle and said he needed to start an IV. It took a little while to find a decent vein. I’ve given blood three times, but I was only successful once. I’ve had IVs twice, once in the wrist and once in the hand, which I pointed out. And on top of that, evidenly being cold makes them harder to find. He cut both my sleeves in the process, looked all over and ended up going with the first spot he looked at. He hooked me up to saline. He said something about people at the hospital needing to run things once I got there, and that’s why I needed the IV. He asked me my name and how old I was. He mispronounced my name a few times before getting it right. He asked me more about how I felt, asked me to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, asked where it hurt the most and how it hurt, wrote it all down. Somewhere in this, the sheriff got out, and we started off to the hospital. He kept asking me where it hurt. I said something about it not being too bad. He started explaining serious accidents causing endorphins and I told him that I knew about it. He asked how. I said something about my mum being a nurse practitioner and he said that his dad had been a nurse practitioner for a number of years. Small world, I guess.

You spend a majority of your life driving on the same roads, and you get used to the state of them, and if you ever found it even mildly annoying, you get to the point where you don’t notice.

Try it in pain and attached to a backboard.

The Irish EMT said something about this not being his truck, that he was having new shocks put in his. Heh. He kept asking me questions. Said something about how he couldn’t give me anything for the pain until we got there. Then a few minutes later decided there was something he could give me. Turns out to be some neo-morphine derivative; works better and faster, and has fewer side effects. “You’re supposed to get 40… But I’ll give you a little more…” (as he’s slowly pushing it through the IV) “Have to put it through slowly. I’m giving you about 50. You should start to feel it… Feel a bit relaxed…”

Kinda washed over me. Wasn’t so bad after that. Although, as late as he started it, we were nearly to the hospital by the time it was done.

He called us into the hospital. Called himself Irish, and they called him Irish back, although it didn’t sink in until we got to the hospital and whoever opened the door also called him Irish. “Irish.” I said. “That’s original… Where did they get that idea?” Everyone laughed. Not so tough a crowd after all.

The only reason I knew where I was as they were rolling me into the hospital in a horizontal, neo-morphine hazy state was due the last time I was in that hospital for a broken, dislocated toe; they didn’t have a room so I sat in a wheelchair right next to the ambulance entrance. They found me a room and rolled me in, picked up the backboard, and put me on the hospital bed.

I was feeling nauseated in general. When I feel nauseated, things touching anywhere on my neck or throat make it worse. C-collars touch everywhere.

This whole interlude, for the most part anyway, is somewhat of a blur. I remember more than one doctor coming to see me. Or one doctor coming to see me, and then another picking up where he left off. Or something like that. I don’t remember the order of some of it. I know they detached me from the backboard, and that was a bit of a trick, as they had taped my head to it by wrapping it all the way around me and the board, so they couldn’t unwrap it, they had to cut it. They managed to undress me without cutting anything else off, although they ended up cutting the rest of the shirt off, mostly out of necessity; since half of it was already cut, getting it off would have been quite a trick. And tricks weren’t really the name of the game at that time. The nurses tried to get as much of the dirt off of the bed as they could, and kind of… Draped a hospital gown around me. The first doctor said they needed to do an ultrasound. I said I knew about them, and he seemed to get irritated with me for saying I knew anything, and came back with, “Do you know what a quick ultrasound is?” I said something or other, and he said no, it was a portable ultrasound machine that they brought in and used. Irish was impressed when I knew something. Evidently not so much with the doctor. It would have been disconcerting on a good day, but it was like a .. proverbial slap in the face. So I didn’t say anything else.

So, they moved my half-on gown (which I will point out again, are more like one huge piece of material attached in a couple of places… Kind of like cutting spaces in a garbage bag to wear it like a poncho. It’s still square…), smeared cold jelly on my tummy and started looking around. They brought in a resident to do the honours. It reminded me a bit of a Where’s Waldo? type deal, back and forth between the resident and the doctor… “That’s the kidney… Is that the kidney?” *squish* “No..” *squish* “That’s the kidney.” *squish* “Okay… Liver…” *squishsquish* “Nope, over here..” *squish* And… “It all looks good.” Somewhere along the line I mentioned that it sucked that I was missing it. I didn’t even have a chance of seeing it anyway, stupid c-collar.

So… You can’t have a CAT scan unless they know you’re not pregnant. Well… Unless you’re a guy that is, but, obviously, I am not. Pregnancy test. Don’t get how? Google it. Why? Because I know the type of people who will be reading this. And they’ll all whine about it if I get into it. Anyway… It’s around 3pm now… At least. Honestly I couldn’t tell you, but I’d been there for a while. I had half a rootbeer that morning. And nothing else. And I had two options: do it in a bedpan or they’d use a catheter. My response: “I’m not sure which of those two options sounds better.” From what I had heard, the second one was probably worse. So… They gave me a bedpan.

A bedpan.

Ever been in that situation? You’re not missing anything. After the age of 2, it is absolutely against your nature to tinkle on yourself. And I don’t see how that could end any other way.

And all I had that day was half a rootbeer.

So…… After 20 minutes of useless concentration… I conceded defeat.

Catheters aren’t as bad as some people have reported to me, but gah. I believe this best describes it: O.o

So they processed the test (no I am not pregnant). While I was waiting, I was listening to the goings on in the ER (what else was I going to do), and to be honest, it was actually somewhat entertaining. “Hey… will you take my MRI upstairs?” “No.” “Oh, come on, I’ll give you 5$…” “Alright then.” Guess that’s the cost of skipping out of a ride on the elevator.

Still nauseated.

They gave me another shot. Actual morphine this time. The other was wearing off, though every so slightly, and I was happy either way to have more to fend off the pain.

Then came the nurse. (Not the one that was bought off, mind you. This was a while later.) I don’t remember his name. You could hear him coming from down… wherever “down” was. Hallway, area, I don’t know. His claim to fame was his impression of Donald Duck. Which was quite audible from quite far away. I’m sure on a good day, and in moderation, I would have found it amusing. However… It was neither a good day or in moderation. I just wanted to lay there, and he kept making jokes or imitations or whatever. Then, yet another awesome turn: they can’t do CAT scans with jewelry in my ears. I wear pretty simple stuff, and it’s all captive bead or labret studs (the point of which is the fact that there’s nothing to catch on anything and therefore can be worn all the time). He tries to get one of the studs undone and realises that he’s not going to be able to do it by hand. So he disappears and shows back up with two sets of pliers and goes to work. I’m seriously assuming that it’s a good thing that I couldn’t see what he was doing. It probably looked pretty horrifying. Anyway, he left some of them in. It was possible that they wouldn’t interfere. So, off we went down the hall to the elevator. Nausea + moving at a clip down a hallway horizontally = mmmmmbluuuuhhhhhh… And there was nothing they could do about it. Still have to act like my back was broken. Can get sued if they don’t and it was. So…

Bleh.

Anyway, CAT scan. I had to move from the gurney onto the machine. I was mumbling complaints about the c-collar so the Donald Duck nurse opened it for a little bit. Told me not to move. They had to leave it open for the CAT anyway, so I had my few minutes of comfort. Well… More than before. Comfort is relative, heh. They had to inject some sort of dye to do 2 of the 4 scans. “You’re going to feel like you’ve peed yourself,” the tech says. And creepily enough, she was right. Feel, being the operative term here, people, this is not a TMI alert. C-collar back on, another horizontal jaunt down the hallways and back to the room.

I was saying how I was still feeling kind of nauseated from running that whole gig, so he suggested tilting the bed a little. He obviously couldn’t bend the bed because of my possible injuries, but the beds can tilt without bending. So he tilts me up a little bit and leaves onto his other duties. I realised very quickly that this was not only not any better, but was in fact much worse. What little I was tilted was sort of letting gravity do some work, and it was putting pressure on my lower body. So I tell my parent’s to find a nurse, that I need the bed tilted back down.

Now let me emphasize a very obvious, but pertinent, fact here… My dad is male.

Why point out something that is as inherent as water being wet? Because males have to mess with things. “Do not enter” reads “Please come in, this means you”, “Do not touch” reads “Please push repeatedly, this means you.” You get the idea. So he starts looking at the bed… Reaches out an experimental foot… I snap at him. He gets a look on his face, and my mum starts in on damage control, “Now don’t get mad at her… Wait for the nurse…” Of course, such things, having not incurred violence or bodily harm yet, do not deter the male. Or my dad. So he starts poking around again, and I start in on him again… “Every comedy movie ever that has a scene in a hospital has something about somebody” (I may have used “idiot” or some equivalent) “messing with the hospital bed and it closing up on them or dumping the patient on the floor…” I wasn’t trying to point out that the situation could be funny. I was doing my best to make a euphemism for “Touch the fucking bed and die.”

The rest of the day was somewhat anticlimactic. Eventually they came and told me that the CAT scan was normal and removed the c-collar. One of the doctors came back with some paperwork and prescriptions. He went over the paperwork; it was a detailed overview of what was wrong with me and what I was supposed to do about it. They sent me home with Lortab (vicodin). They wanted me to get up and walk to make sure that I could. A nurse came to walk with me. I pointed out that I had no pants. So she went to find me pants and footies and came back. Walking was a trick… Not so simple. I put most of the weight of my ride side on the nurse. The doctor said that was about how it should be and sent me home.

I threw up on the way home. Side effect of morphine, my mum said. The fentanyl didn’t do that. Maybe they should start using that all the time instead. Oh well. We stopped and got my prescriptions filled… It was right when the pharmacy was supposed to close, and evidently the pharmicist already had his hat and coat on and he still filled my scripts.

There was already a steak dinner planned for that night. My mum told me I had to eat a yogurt or something first to make sure my stomach was settled. I couldn’t bring myself to eat much of the yogurt, but I ate some crackers and then most of an apple that she cut up for me. Both of us being satisfied that I could keep down some food, I got to eat my nice steak dinner. I washed up in my parent’s shower before leaving. They have a really nice walk in shower with 2 showerheads, the removable spray shower head deals, and controlled temperature. So, while on a normal day this is nice, it made things infinitely easier than it would in my simple tub/shower at home. My mum gave me a pair of her sweatpants. I got a ride home.

I was afraid to take the Lortab. I was so happy that my stomach was settled that I didn’t want to do anything that might have messed it up. That didn’t bode well for anything else in the near future. I cried getting out of the car and walking into the house. Getting into pjs and into bed was a trick.

And with that I went to sleep. I had a pillow under my knees and a glass of water next to the bed. I was given a bowl incase I was sick again. I wasn’t sure how much good that would do. Bowls aren’t that deep… And the angle of the sides is perfect for… Not keeping anything going into them at a decent velocity in them at all. Didn’t end up needing it though. Good thing.

Not exactly midnight and not exactly Georgia, but hey. We play the hand we’re dealt.

I got brave and decided to take a route to Union Station that involved both buses and the El. The Chicago Transit Authority has a Trip Planner on their site where you can put in the time you want to leave, where you are starting and ending, choose how far you are willing to walk, and whether you want the route that is quickest, has the lease number of transfers, or has the least amount of walking. They give you three or four different route possibilities, and I managed to find one that involved the train. So Andrew wrote down the bus stops and where we were headed on the train. We got on the first bus, got transfers and got off at exactly the right place. We got on the train, found out the transfers work there too. We walked up the wrong set of stairs, and ended up on the wrong side of the platform, but the lady there told us to take the train down one stop, cross over the tracks there to the other side and board the correct train there. And we did, everything worked great. So we’re on the train, going going, it’s wobbling, starting, stopping etc etc. Then at some point Andrew starts to get a slightly perplexed look on his face, and finally says, “I don’t think we were supposed to go this far.” We look at each other for a minute. And he says, “Union Station is at the base of the Sears Tower, and that’s way back there.” So I take the directions he wrote down, and I realise that all he wrote down was what it said about the train line as a whole, ie. “The Green Line to Cottage Grove,” which is in fact, the end of the line, not where we needed to go. I pointed out that the bus we were supposed to get on was at Adam’s and something, and there’s a stop on the train at Adam’s and something. So… We got off the train, and waited for another train to come back the other way. Now it’s been something like 20 minutes or something, and we were actually starting to wonder if I was going to miss my train. We were also wondering if the train we just got off was actually going to be the same train, and that we would have to wait until it went all the way to the end of the line and came back. The train finally came the other way (and it wasn’t the same train, heh) and we got on and went to the right stop. We ended up getting on a different bus than the route suggested, but it was the same bus we rode from Union Station when we got to Chicago in the first place, so we knew where it went. We got into the station and found my train.

I showed the lady my ticket, and she said, “Make sure you tell them you’re business class.” So, I followed the other people, and they got on the train at the first open door. Down the way, though, there were conductors waving their arms. So, I went down to them. “I have business class.” “You’re all the way down to the last car before the engine.” So, I got on the train to walk through it, since that’s what we did when we came to Chicago. I walked through two cars, and there was a little metal barrier in the door to the next car. So I got off and got back on and walked through that car. I got to the end of it, and the door was locked. So I had to get off again. The close door in the business car was closed, so I had to walk all the way to the other end of it. I got on, and there were no seats.

…

I said something to a conductor looking guy standing around, and he pointed me to another guy, who told me to have a seat in the dining car, and that they would get everything figured out. He was the guy working the food counter. He sat down to eat some McDonalds before we left, and was talking to me about how everything was probably fine. “Usually someone thinks they have business class, and they don’t. They get their tickets through a travel agent and they say, ‘Oh, we’ll get you first class everything,’ when really they end up with coach and don’t bother to notice.” Then he said that they hadn’t overbooked anything in years. I was still pretty worried. Finally, this getting-things-done, black-woman-attitude conductor came through the car, and said, “What’s wrong.” “No seats.” “Come up here, then, we’ll get it figured out.” She walks to the front of the car and says, “Everyone get out your tickets. I’m checking the tickets.” Normally when they take the tickets, you need ID, so people were grabbing those too, and she says, “I don’t need IDs, I just need tickets.” The dining car guy comes in to tell everyone what they have to drink and eat, and he says something about coming on back, things were ready, and she says, “Hold on, now, I’m checking tickets first.” The second row that she got to, she says, “These are for the 25th. This is the 24th. These are for tomorrow.” “What?” There was some back and forth, and she was saying something about having people with correct tickets waiting for these seats, and she says loudly to me, “Come up here. This is your seat.” And the ladies said, “So what do we do?” And she says quite bluntly, “You’re sitting in coach.” So I headed up there and they said, “Well it’s going to take a few minutes…” The conductor just stared at them, and called me forward, and they ended up moving pretty quickly. I set my bag down in one seat, and I sat in the other. She told me to move my bag because she was going to seat a gentleman there. And that was that.

Little kids are annoying in every language.

There’s a little boy in front of me. He and his family are German. Funny how the kid seems overly smart for being able to speak fluent German, when in fact he probably can’t speak very good English. For the first hour or so, he was quiet, and he was drawing with a notebook and coloured pencils. He drew a train. And it was amusing to me that he drew an old-school coal type train. He’s only about 9 or 10. I didn’t realise they (being whoever is teaching now-a-days) were still using that type of picture for “train”. Kind of false advertising if you ask me.

Now the first hour is over and he’s suddenly realised he can tilt his chair back. I’m in business class, so chair tilting is absolutely fine, because I have so much leg room, my feet are barely on the foot rest. It’s the realising that if you sit forward and then press the release on the chair, it bangs forward, makes noise, and wiggles the chair. And it does the same thing if you do it again. And again. And again.

I bought cheese this morning. There’s a little market down Illinois from Michigan Ave called Fox and Obel. I’d seen it on one walk by, and stopped in there the next walk by. It’s the perfect type of market. All gourmet, special brand-type foods, interesting foreign stuff and so on. I went back again this morning. They have a cheese counter with a person working behind it. I went back again this morning, and come to find out, it’s the type of cheese counter that should exist everywhere… Quite european in fact. The woman working this morning asks me if I’m looking for anything special, I tell her no, and she says. “Well you can have tastes.” Tastes. So I can stand here and sample the cheeses and then buy what I want based on what I actually like. And so I did. Great cheese too.

The boy has a green folded up piece of cardboard now. Like a luggage tag or something. And he’s dropping it and catching it mid-air. Which would be fine, except he’s getting louder and more obnoxious with it by the minute. And he missed, it bounced off the chair next to me, and landed in the seat. He said sorry, but he was told to sit down anyway.

The cheese-counter woman was interesting… She evidently married a German and was moving to Germany soon. She said she’d never been much into MI and I wanted to tell her she wasn’t missing anything. I told her it has it’s nice places, and if you like the outdoors there are some fabulous places to hike and camp. She said she’d always imagined it to be a “gentle place.” If she considers “gentle” to be a euphemism for “fairly boring” then I suppose she’s right. She actually seemed, though, like the type of person who would consider a place like this to be “gentle.”

I don’t feel so well.

Now he’s being a train whistle.

I saw llamas, cows, horses, deer, sandhill cranes.

In Dearborn, there was a couple with their two children, probably one and two years old or so, and they walked by the window towards the engine, and then walked back, and the boy, the older of the two, was sobbing and screaming, loud enough that I actually heard him from in the train coach. His mom, who was holding him, was saying what appeared to be “Wave goodbye to the train!” given that she turned him towards it and waved like parents of tiny children do when trying to teach them “goodbye”… She gave up pretty quick. His little sister was just looking around.

The family was sitting in one of the double seats, and then two of the single seats. The boy and his mother were in the pair, and his father and sister were sitting in the single seats. Through out the ride, he’s switched his mother with his father, and then with his sister by loudly pulling them over to his pair of seats. Now he’s sitting in the front single seat, with the lounge-chair-style leg-rest pointing upward at a 45 degree angle and he’s loudly singing some song in German.

The guy working the dining car came back here before we got to Dearborn to tell us that he’d be closing after, and to come get anything else we wanted. I asked for 2 cranberry juices, which makes 5 total. In public-transportation-concession-speak, that means something like 8-10$. But, I’m in business class. So it was free. I make them work for my business class seat.

It’s pretty much time for me to go, and no one ever sat next to me. It’s fine though. Just meant my bag was in the overhead compartment and I still had another seat to myself.

I walked to the aquarium twice, once with Andrew and once alone. I walked back long the water. Near the aquarium is a marina, in which a number of sail boats are moored. All the sails were down, and as the wind rippled the ropes and cables, it tapped the hooks and clasps against masts, making such an amazing sound. It sounded like a hundred tiny wind chimes, spread out over the water. There wasn’t much sound from the streets or the city… Just the water and the wind.

Hazard being the keyword. This is after all Chicago. Which size-wise eats every major city in Michigan for lunch. Including an appetizer and dessert.

The train ride was essentially uneventful. We took advantage of our free beverages. Somewhere close to Chicago, we had to wait a few minutes while traffic up the line cleared, and then we continued on, and got to Chicago pretty much on time.

Once we got there, we had to catch a bus to the hotel. Such things should be rather simple. Most of the bus stops have maps of which busses go where. Where being your destination. Which would imply you know where your destination is. Our destination: a Marriott.

A Marriott.

As in, a certain someone had not printed out any sort of itinerary and only had a general idea of where he actually had reservations. It was a Marriott and it was on or near a road that started with an H. In downtown Chicago. So, we crammed, and let me emphasize crammed, onto a bus and headed in the general direction that Andrew figured was correct. At some point, he pulled the string and we got off. He said we passed the road he thought we were supposed to stop at, but that was ok. We walked back about a block and found, lo and behold… A Marriott.

We walked inside and were looking around and both sort of paused. “This is a pretty nice hotel…” I said. That is if by “pretty nice” I mean upscale and expensive, porters and valets, continental breakfasts and turndown services, hot towels and minibars type nice. Paid for by the University. Andrew decided that maybe he’d better look at the itinerary. After finding the address and asking one of the people at the information desk (”No.” “Yes, just do it.” “No, we’ll figure it out.” “Just go ask.” “Fine.”), we figured out that we were not in fact staying at the Marriott, but rather the Courtyard by Marriott. Some few blocks this way and a couple that way.

Here’s where I really start kicking myself for packing so much stuff. Not having travelled to such places before, I hadn’t really thought the walking part through… And under normal circumstances in such places, we could have taken a cab, but considering neither of us had ever done that before, and were therefore apprehensive, and also the key point that we didn’t actually know where we were going… We had to take the bus and end up at the wrong hotel before figuring out where we needed to go. Lucky for me, Andrew is a very nice guy, and he carried my duffel and let me drag his rolling luggage instead.

We found the Courtyard, and while still quite nice, it was certainly much more appropriately fitting to a University-sponsored business trip. No minibar or even a fridge. However the beds were comfy and it had free internet. A geek can be quite happy in a place like that.

The “train station” in Pontiac is most certainly anything but. It’s an elevated concrete sidewalk with a sign reading “Train Station.” Wishful thinking at it’s best.

Andrew ended up buying my ticket with the AAA discount as well as his own. They reiterate many times the fact that you have to have your membership card when presenting the ticket to the conductor. We figured worst case scenario they would make us pay the difference, but it was still proving to be a slight source of anxiety. They don’t bother to check tickets until the train is already moving (which I guess has it’s reasons, and they can just make you pay before you get off if you don’t have a ticket, but still…), so it wasn’t until a little while into the ride that things were settled. They didn’t even mention it.

Trains are huge. They may seem large when they are driving by while holding you up in traffic. But if you’ve never ridden a train, you have no idea just how large they are until you have to walk by the engine to get on the train.

We got on the train at one end and walked up towards the front. We had business class seats. But, I hadn’t ever been on a train at all, much less been on one enough to be able to differentiate between coach and business class. Andrew didn’t seem quite as clueless as me, but he was still slightly confused. He told me to sit and wandered back where we came. Eventually a few other people, who clearly had done this before, boarded and were mumbling something about business class. We followed them and finally found the right coach; it was at the very front of the train. Upon later consideration, it made perfect sense that it would be located at the front. Otherwise coach passengers would be able to wander through.

Graffiti artists are actually really good. I was thinking about that. We definitely passed enough of it on our way out of Pontiac and through Detroit. There were a couple of really lamely done paintings and I pointed out that I could do something like that. But it always amazes me how good people get with spray paint cans. I’m thinking now that I should do a photography exhibition of graffiti. Although the type of place that a person can stand around with multiple cans of spray paint and make illegal art is not exactly the type of place a girl like me should be walking around with 2k$ worth of photography equipment. Could take a couple of huge guys with me… But I wouldn’t bank on that really working.

The guy serving in the dining car was a trip. Sounded something like this: “Alright, alright now, what can I get for you..” “French toast and sausage.” “..french toast and sausage, alright, we’ll get you all squared away, alright, next one, what can I get for you..” “A bagel.” “..alright, alright, a bagel, we’ll get you all squared away, how about you, what can I get for you..” “A bagel.” “..alright, we’ll get that right up for you, next..” “French toast and sausage.” “..french toast and sausage, see they only give me two of those per trip, not what they call a hot ticket item, but we’ll get you taken care of, get you all squared away, what about you two..” “A bagel.” “A bagel.” “..two bagels, I’m in bagel heaven here, who else wants a bagel, anyone else need a bagel, we’ll get you all squared away, what about you..” “French toast and sausage.” “..see, now I don’t know how to break it to you, but they only give me two of those per trip, not what they call a hot ticket item, so I only have two per trip, now lets get the line wrapped around this way, so we’re not standing in business class, move on around here, what about you, lets keep it going so I can get everyone squared away, what can I get for you..” “A cinnamon roll and a coffee.” “Alright, alright, I got your coffee right here, go ahead and pick up your cinnamon roll there, I got cream and sugar right here, grab a stirrer if you need one, go ahead and move over here so you’re not in business class, they paid their 10$ for their privacy..” (He wandered out from behind the counter and closed the little curtain between the dining car and business class, all the while still talking…) “..so what can I get for you..” “A bagel.” “..a bagel, see I’m in bagel heaven here, now just wait a bit so i can heat that up, they only give me this microwave, what I really need is an oven over there, so just give me a minute, I’ll get you all squared away, “..what can I get for you..” [me] “A bagel.” “Just keeps coming with the bagels, what can I get for you..” [Andrew] “A pepsi.” “Thank heaven, I’ll get you all squared away, just give me a minute here, now what about Beatles over here, what can I get for you..” (I have to point out here that there was a girl in line wearing a Beatles shirt.) “A water and a muffin.” “..just pick out your muffin right there, and I’ll get you your water, I got a story about the Beatles, my mom once waited on the Beatles, but they were so drunk she had no idea, so she waited on the Beatles and then she sees a picture of them, and says ‘I waited on those fellas,’ but they’d had so much to drink she had no idea who they were when she waited on them, now I’ve got you all squared away, so what can I get for you…”

The whole time. Never really paused once. He was quite entertaining.