THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAIN TRIP OF 2019 PART 6 ATLANTA, NEW ORLEANS AND HOME TO LONG BEACH

We arrived in Gainsesville Virginia  early in the morning. We got off of the train in Gainsesville because Scott who picked us up wisely didn't want to drive in or out of Atlanta during the morning rush hour.
Scott Douglas and his wife Debra are old and very dear friends of mine. Scott was a loan rep in Long Beach in 1979 when I met him. He and Debra are gifted conversationalists and are very gracious hosts. They have a house in Hilton Head, SC where we visited  them last year. I don't know how they feel but I always think that our visits together are all too brief. Scott is a very capibale cook and a real wizard on his infamous green egg BBQ. Our visit was a veritable food frenzy. Debra's mother Irene who I loved was a masterful Italian cook and her talent rubbed off on her daughter. 
We went to a few Georgia wineries, who knew? We also had three dogs at their home to play with. Red is a Red Border Collie and is way too smart for a so called dumb animal. Shadow is a big brown Labrador Retriever who is sweet and is getting a little long in the tooth. Cooper is a tall lanky American Fox Hound and is a real rascal. All too soon we departed again on the AMTRAK Crescent on our way to New Orleans.
The AMTRAK Sunset limited only departs New Orleans on Monday, Wednesday and Saturdays. So we, once we got in to the Hotel late and the departure was 9:00 AM. So once again our Visit to The Big Easy was all too short. 
I was hoping to get a Muffuletta samich at Central Grocery where it originated but we got into town too late and left too early. This is the fourth failed attempt to get a Muffuletta at Central Grocery. The first time I went to CG was on a Monday and they are closed on Mondays. The second time I was too late, they had already closed. The third time I didn't go on a Monday and I got to CG while they were still open. I walked up to a ominously quiet counter and ordered my samich. The nice man behind the counter said that they had run out of bread by the time I got there, Hopefully the fourth time will be a charm.

THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAIN TRIP OF 2019 PART 5 NYC to WASHINGTON DC

The train to DC wasn't all the scenic after dark and we arrived somewhat late. When we walked out of the Union Train Station the Capitol Building's dome was very visible. This was a very nice welcome to DC. We Ubered to Roslyn, Va where our hotel was located. We chose this particular hotel for not only price but convenience. We could walk the less than one mile and catch the ever popular Hop On/Hop Off double decker bus. 

As is our usual MO we rode the entire route before picking out where to get off of the bus. We went to the Lincoln Memorial, The Capitol Building, the Vietnam War Memorial, Kennedy Center and The Smithsonian Air and Space museum. I dined at Union Train Station on a Shake Shack burger. These burgers are reputed to be the best in the USA, IE the world. Not so. It was a good burger, maybe a great burger but it didn't measure up to an In and Out.

On our last day in DC we Ubered out to Mount Vernon to visit with George. George is buried in a vault on the grounds. 

We again boarded the AMTRAK Crescent which we first boarded in New York City. The Crescent took us to Atlanta and a few days later on to New Orleans.

THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAIN TRIP OF 2019 PART 4 CLEVELAND TO NYC

We arrived in Cleveland, the place of my birth, at 0530 the crack of dawn at the AMTRAK Lakefront Station. This was a bit of a disappointment because I was used to using the Terminal Tower train station. The Terminal Tower was built  during the skyscraper boom of the 1920s and 1930s, it was the second tallest building in the world  when it was completed and was. The TT was a pride of Cleveland when I lived there.
We Ubered to Hopkins Airport to rent a car and proceeded to stay at my sister's house in Seven Hills. I try to visit my sister back in Ohio at least every other year and stay with her for about a week. I also visited with Art my childhood friend and we did our usual beer drinking thing. 
Jamie and I went out to The Schnitzel HOUSE and I had a Wienerschnitzel with spatzle. Ethnic food, German Polish Italian etc., seems to taste a bit better back East. I also wanted to have a fish fry  on Friday like I used to have with my mom and dad on Fridays. My mouth ached for fresh water Perch but it wasn't to be. I also had a corned beef sammich at Slaymen's. Good corned beef is a real rarity in Cali. Lord knows that I've tried at Canter's and Langer's Delicatessions but it isn't like I remembered. I also had City Chicken at my cousin Nancy's. That was as good as I remembered. Bravo Zulu Nancy.
The train station in Cleveland is open from 10:30 PM to 6:30 AM because of the only two trains that still stop in Cleveland are at 2 AM and 5:30 AM.
We took the train to Buffalo and my old Waddell shipmate Guy Ward met us at the station. Guy showed us a hell of a good time while there. We went to Niagara Falls on both the USA and Canada sides. We lunched in a picture postcard little town called Niagara on the Lake in Ontario Canada The place is as cute a small town that you will ever see. At lunched there, I finally tasted poutine, the so called national dish of Canada. Poutine is a plate of french fries with gravy and cheese curds on top. We also went to Wayne Gretzky's distillery for a whiskey flight and then to the other side of the building for a tasting of his, Wayne's, wines. The next day we went to the Buffalo Naval  Park and toured a 2150 ton Fletcher class destroyer which is a tad bit smaller than my 4500 ton DDG but still very representative of what life in a tin can is like. FYI, DDG is a guided missile destroyer and a tin can is any destroyer in navy talk. USS Little Rock was also on display along side of USS Sullivans. Little Rock is a CLG or "light" guided missile cruiser and displasses about 12,000 tons or about three times as large. I was a Guidedmissileman and then a Missile Technician for uver eight years in the Terrior/Tartar program. The third T in the Three T program is the Talos missile and is quite a bit larger then Terriers and tartars but I had never been up close to a Talos. Like the CLG it was about three times as my birds and was very ungainly to be ship launched. 
After two days in Buffalo we boarded the train to New York City, The Big Apple. We stayed at The Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC. The Pensylvania Hotel is huge with something like 1800 rooms. We checked into a smallish one bedroom but it had mold on the wall. In all fairness the hotel is over one hundred years old and is in a renovation project. Jamie called the front desk and complained and the desk said come on down, just like Let's Make a Deal. When she arrived, they handed her the keys to a two room suite which is where we stayed. 
While in NYC, we took a Hop On/Hop Off bus around downtown and then another uptown to get the lay of the land. After getting our bearings, we did some touristy stuff like going to Times Square and the Empire State Building. We went to a New York deli and I tried the NYC corned beef which was good but not exceptional. We took a ferry to The Statue of Liberty and Ellis island. I ate Sabrett's hot dogs and had Ney York pizza.

THE HOP ON/HOP OFF BUS

We first discovered the Hop On/Hop Off Bus when we were in London. After taking the Underground, subway, for a few days we tried the HO/HO.

We boarded the bus by our hotel in Kensington and could get off at any stop like Buckingham Palace. We could then, as it's name implied, reboard any of the HO/HO buses that stopped at any of the twenty five, or so, stops on a route which is on a map that they, HO/HO supply. A set of earplugs is issued on boarding which you plug into a box on the bus and a narrative, sometimes live and sometimes canned,  is supplied.

You can sit on the bus all day long, if you prefer, and ride the thing round and around town.

We next tried the Hop On/Hop Off bus in Rome on several trips there and it was pretty much the same experience, big red double decker open top bus with the same layout. In London channel number one on the little box for the earbuds was in English and I didn't pay any attention to what languages were on the other eight channels. In Rome and Florence English was on channel number two. Italian was naturally the first channel.

We utilized the HO/HO bus again in Chicago, New York City and again in Washington DC today. Same setup except the busses here in the USA are brown instead of red.

We take a full, complete ride around the full course on the first day to get the lay of the land, so to say. This allows us to figure what we want to see and what we don't. New York had four different so called loops. Downtown and Uptown which we took and Harlem and Brooklyn which we didn't take. In DC, they have three loops. The red which was the most comprehensive the blue which we also took and the yellow which we skipped.

We bought  a two day pass so tomorrow we will go back and hop on the bus which stops near our hotel and see what we missed today and still want to see.