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.

THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAIN TRIP OF 2019 PART 3 CHICAGO TO CLEVELAND

After taking the Hop on/Hop off Bus in Chicago we took the AMTRAK Lake Shore Limited to Cleveland. The Amtrak station is called the Lakefront Station and arrived at 0545 in the morning. This was a bit of a disappointment because the last time I took a train from Chicago was in 1959 and you could say a few things have changed since than. The train was on the New York Central Railroad and it's terminal was in the Terminal Tower which was then the tallest building in the USA outside of New York. Needless to say, the Lakefront Station doesn't live up to the grandeur of the old TT as we called it.

Cleveland is my place of birth and I grew up there. I still maintain that Cleveland was the ideal place for a kid, especially this kid, to grow up in. I grew up in Garfield Heights a suburb contiguous to to Cleveland. It, Garfield Heights, wasn't big city living and it wasn't quite suburban life either. I became streetwise at an early age but I didn't  have to live among gangs and high crime either. 

My sister also still lives in Cleveland. FYI, I define Cleveland as everyplace between Harrisburg, PA and Chicago. It's not a really nice place to visit and I certainly don't want to live there. There is a lot of culture in Cleveland. There is a world class orchestra and art museum and a huge library to get immersed in as I used to do on one of my many days of playing hooky.  The place has changed a lot, for the good, since I left there fifty nine years ago. I am now a card carrying Long Beach resident. 

We had a nice time while there and I visited with my sister and her husband, saw my childhood friend Art and got reacquainted with my cousin Nancy whom I hadn't seen in decades. 

But five or six days is all my crotchety self can take these days so we stayed at the Red Roof Inn near the airport and then took a Uber to the station to catch the 0550 on the Thursday morning train to Buffalo where we are now.

 

THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAIN TRIP OF 2019 PART 2 CHICAGO TO INDIANAPOLIS

We had the pleasure of riding a Greyhound bus from Chicago to Nap Town. We had taken a Mexican bus from Loreto BCS to Tijuana three years ago but I haven't been on a Greyhound been on a Greyhound for many years. 

After 44 hours on the train with only the Subway sandwiches and an apple fritter, and little sleep on the train, we were beat and we wanted to sleep but first food. I was wanting a world famous Chicago hot dog so I went to a dog and sandwich shop at Union Station and bought a bratwurst with chili-cheese fries. A well balanced meal. The brat had a real, thick casing and was delicious. 

Some things had changed and other things didn't. The bus itself was modern and comfortable but it seemed to have more than a few miles on it. We departed Amtrak's Union Station in Chicago and the bus was carrying the usual assortment of  prototypical long distance bus riders, the less well healed. 

We stayed at the Crown Plaza at Indy. Jamie told me that the hotel was built inside of  the old Indianapolis train station and I thought oh swell. A hotel inside a hundred plus year old train station which is probably in a ghetto. What a pleasant surprise it was. The "ghetto" has been mostly rebuilt and the hotel is one of the nicest I've stayed at and I've stayed in hotels all over the world. Some of the rooms are in refurbished Pullman train cars, I am sure I will be staying the again.

THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAIN TRIP OF 2019 PART 1 LOS ANGELES TO CHICAGO

We boarded AMTRAK train #4 in Fullerton, CA which is a suburb of LA at 1835, 6:35 to you civilians, for Chicago. I have never taken a long trip by train in the USA. I went to Chicago from Cleveland on the New York Central for boot camp in 1959 and took the Pennsylvania Railroad from Cleveland to Philadelphia in 1960 when I went on active duty. But that was it.

Now I have traveled all over Europe Australia and Japan by train. We traveled around Europe in 1975 on a thirty day Eurail Pass and that was a very good trip, almost perfect. So I was expecting a very similar experience with AMTRAK. With the Eurail Pass we just hopped on any train and flashed our pass and sat down in a compartment. Not so here. We bought  our passes in Fullerton and after they had our money they explained that there was only one "pass seat" still available on this train.  It took another $69 to get a second seat to get us both to Chicago. This was all taking place about five minutes before the train was due to arrive at the station. I've been shot at and missed and shit at and hit but even this was trying my anxiety.

At 1830 we had both of our tickets in hand and at 1835 the train breezed into the station. We were told by both the station agent and the conductor at the door of the train that the train was "fully booked". Because of this fully booked situation, we HAD to sit in our assigned seats. Well our car was about 50% occupied and some of the other cars looked to be less than 25% occupied.

Pros and cons: the European trains had compartments and almost always we had a compartment to ourselves. The AMTRAK cars have no compartments and are large with tons of legroom but we had to endure whatever neighbors we were seated by. The food on the Euro trains was very good and a little pricey but still affordable. The only thing missing on the AMTRAK dining car was a highwayman with a gun while you were being robbed. A small, 12 ounce, bottle of water was $2.25 and if you wanted an airline bottle of  booze was $7.00. The needless complications on AMTRAK reflect, in my ever so humble opinion, the bureaucratic mind set of the morons running what could be a going national railroad concern that severely degrades  the experience.

On a score of one to ten, I would rate the Euro trains a 9.5. Amtrak is about a seven.

It looks like two days down and 29 to go.

LUDWIG

I had the pleasure of selling apartment buildings in Long Beach in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1976, my soon to be second  wife Bernice who was already selling apartments convinced me  to quit my day job and get a real estate license. I say pleasure because although I didn't much care for Realtors and "the business", I did learn the valuable skill of salesmanship. A not so minor side benefit

of learning this craft is I also made a very nice living. 

I know you are wondering who the hell Ludwig is and why did I name this little opus Ludwig.  I'll get to that soon enough but right now I'm telling a story. 

I actually met Bernice in 1971 at a lamb roast in Manhattan Beach. Walt, one of the salesmen at work invited me and my wife to his brother's annual lamb roast. I had a great time at the party doing my usual schtick,  drinking beer and telling funny stories with a guy named Stan. Stan was at the time, married to Bernice. While Stan and I and the rest of the guys were being our usual obnoxious selves, Bernice was off to one side chatting with Judy my first wife. Judy was showing pictures of our four year old son Ed. Judy told me later that Bernice commented that she would love to have a cute little boy like Ed. 

Fast forward three years and Judy and I are divorced as are Stan and Bernice. Stan ran a "cabin" up at Mammoth Mountain for the last few years along with Walt and his brother Stan and a few other guys. The cabin started out as a smallish house and later on became a condo across the road from the Moguls restaurant with a hot tub and sauna. We would all pitch in $250 for the year and take our skis and gear up to Mammoth for the season. If a friend accompanied you he, or she, would cost them $10 per night. This usually filled in the short capitol. Bernice on one occasion called Stan to see if he was going skiing one weekend. As it was, he wasn't so she went up to the mountain. She and I skied together all weekend and one thing led to another. 

Bernice had quit teaching English  at a third world school in Carson ans said if she could make a living in real estate over the summer that she wasn't coming back. And did she ever make a living. She persuaded me "to work smart not hard". I went to real estate school and passed the test and got my license. All of my life I had been told that I was "a natural born salesman". But it takes more to be really successful in the Southern California real estate market than talent. You need to be trained. So I went to several courses taught by people like Tommy Hopkins the Ayatollah of closing and others and I did quite well. My first year I owed more in taxes than I earned the previous year. By 1981, I was burned out. The economy was in the toilet and the prime hit 23. 

My motto for years is I don't believe in luck but I do rely on it. I got a call from a company in Gardena that I knew of as the rep for West Instruments. They told me that they could get a contract from Barber-Colman if they could get someone who thoroughly knew the BC product line. Ron, the president of the Gardena company asked just where am I to find some guy like that in the LA area? The product manager at BC mentioned me by name. Ron called the office manager of his company in Santa Clara who also mentioned me by name. Ron was not a very good poker player and asked me to come to talk to his sales manager. Mister I have multiple degrees didn't know squat about sales. He couldn't sell ladders in a burning building. He droned on for two hours telling me how smart he was so I asked him if he was interested in hiring little old me and if he was, to kindly make me an offer. I made me a pretty good offer and I told him he'd have to do better than that. I felt like Joe Montana playing Pop Warner football. This was all too easy. He told me that he'd have to talk to the owner. So I said thank you and left. Early the next morning my phone rang and I knew I was about to change professions.

OK, I'm about to get to Ludwig.

Month in and month out I was not only the top salesman in the office, I did always at least twice as much as the number two dog in sales. Both the owner and the so called sales manager started asking me what my secret was. I told them that there were no secrets. It was all a matter of training and experience. They asked could I, would I, train the other guys. I said I would but I didn't want to impinge on my sales so if they were OK with on the job training I could have the other guys one, by one, ride with me. By ride with me, I actually meant they would do the driving and I would explain to them where were going next and what we intended to accomplish when we got there. 

They were bringing on a new guy, a kid from Boston straight out of college named Ludwig. They wanted to know how soon I could start on Lud. I said I would love to start with a blank canvas and not have to break him out of any bad habits.

Next chapter I'll tell you my Lud stories.