AMTRAK TO NEW YORK
Susie and I parked my car in the Wake County Parking Deck and were ready to board the train at 9, but Train 92, Silver Star, from Miami to New York was an hour and a half late as were almost all the Amtrak trains I rode on last summer, some four hours late.
So we walked around downtown Raleigh looking for a place to get a cup of coffee. But on a bright Saturday morning when the streets of Asheville would have been filled and the streets of New York would be filled, the streets of downtown Raleigh were empty. There were no movie theaters or restaurants or coffee shops and no people, the first probably because of the second. Downtown Raleigh, the state capitol, was obviously a 9 to 5 weekday government and bank building purely business town.
We caught the train. We had comfortable seats but the windows were so glazed with spatter that it was almost impossible to see out and certainly impossible to photograph through. The one photograph of the trip was of a woman/man with a marvelous cackle who roamed the aisle in loud conversation with whoever would talk with him/her. We slept, read, ate the food we had brought with us, wandered the Internet and passed the time.
We got to New York at 8 at night and walked the twenty short blocks to our hotel with New York humming with life all around us and settled into our quite comfortable 10×12 room with the bathroom just down the hall at $150 a night and fell asleep.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 