Yes, I look like hell in this photograph. It was a tough day for my Husband and I on Friday.
It all started when we arrived at Chicago's Union Station for our journey home to Los Angeles.
We went to the Metropolitan Lounge to get a comfortable seat and some potential snacks and drink and figure out what to have for lunch.
We were immediately told that we would be on a bus to Kansas City Kansas, instead of a train.
We had no idea why, but it was eventually revealed that there had been a major train derailmant just north of Kansas City in Marceline, Missouri (the birthplace of Walt Disney by the way).
You can read the story HERE.
We were not given any options, like taking the California Zephyr or the Texas Eagle. Both trains boarded within the hour we were sitting in the lounge.
We were also not told that we could have rebooked our trip to Saturday and not had to deal with the bus.
Instead, half an hour after our scheduled departure, we were almost the last 2 people loaded onto a bus and it drove off at 3:30PM.
Thankfully with some water and snack boxes. What we did not know is those snack boxes were not very nutritious and by around 7PM we really wanted some dinner.
That was not on their agenda we were lucky we got 2 bathroom breaks over the course of a 9 hour trip!
We reached Kansas City Kansas at 1AM, but they would not let us onto the train until after 2AM. There was a bus 3 hours behind ours (bet they got dinner before they left Chicago).
They boarded around 7AM and then we finally got to start our journey. It ended up being almost 11 hours later than scheduled, with the train meet of the Northbound Southwest Chief at the Raton Pass tunnel.
In good news for us, we finally got to see all of Kansas in the day time and so the delay was not a total loss. Nice state you have there, Kansas.
During the 4 segments of train travel, we ended up about 3 hours late on the first one, 3 hours late on the second one, 1 hour late on the third one and a whopping 11 hours late on that final one. In other words we lost almost an entire day due to delays on the trains.
I was not really upset with most of the delays, that is part of riding the train. What got me so upset was that the bus ride was masked and during Covid times. I had deliberately scheduled our journey to be as safe as possible and the bus was not.
The more I think about that second bus, the more I figure they got dinner because that bus was filled with Coach passengers. They have to buy everything in the way of food, none is provided by AMTRAK. Thus, bringing them somewhere to buy their dinner, was not the problem our bus would have had. We would have definitely told AMTRAK to foot the food bill.
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