Let me get this hot tub out. My lil portable one I have in the rear left pannier. Fill er up on this water fountain. Time Machine time. We need to go back just a few weeks, I’m on the Amtrak app. I’m home. Actually, I’m probably at work so I’m probably on the desktop computer website. Tapping away, nonetheless – just with fingers not thumbs. I book a flex ticket from Alton Illinois to Chicago Illinois and I add on the $10 bicycle too. Alton is basically East St. Louis. Took me like 10 minutes to speed past it before all that hot yoga last week. This ticket’s been my bail out plan the whole time in case either Katy was a lot more than I could handle or I just took my time so much that it became a real vacation. There’s like 10 other Amtrak stations through the state and I’ve mostly followed the route of them, having seen the train pass me a few times. So yeah that brings us up to now, get out I gonna drain this thing.
Now is 4:30 AM me taking a massive crap in this vault toilet there’s no seat. It’s one of those stainless steel. Just sit on it and I do. Doo doo. No cars woke me. It’s that I’ve already slept eight hours.
Hello, circadian rhythm.
After that, it’s 60ish miles to downtown Chicago OR 13 miles between me and this Joliet Amtrak station AKA my last chance to board and take advantage of this ticket to ride. Chicago all the way means 30 more miles of rail trail in front of me +25 miles of god forsaken suburban cycling nightmares and then a big question mark of City vehicular traffic. I wanna ride. It’s more good than bad miles for sure. The weather is nice with no wind. I do wanna ride. I can ride.
Speaking of can. Trains can. Even little ones know they could. Amtrak, like the USPS and a long list of other entities, is basically a federale operation being starved out of funding that we generally spend on the military industrial complex. Or whatever the kids are calling it now. Thats what Truman called it. Train travel like mail delivery is a national operation provided for the betterment of citizens and visitors the the USA but we handcuff them into shoestring budgets and lack of flexible innovation. I do wanna shout out all the Amtrak employees who do a great job. Including those conducting the train. Including those that answer the phone. You can literally call or text an actual American living and working in this country 24/7 for customer service. The women that helped me flex my flex ticket has a wicked Long Island/New Jersey accent. Those are different accents but I can’t tell.
Still having all sorts of indecision on the last section of this rail trail this morning. I did this to myself. Going 7 miles an hour. Right down to the last mile before a turn off. It’s a turn on. It’s all because of that flexible rigidity. Or was it rigid flexibility? Either way me thinks it’s the ultimate outcome in a series of planned and successively integrated situation so that I could put off making choices until the very end to figure out what I had in me without overcommitting and being all fucked up somewhere. It’s my typical long ride one-day-routine of pushing goalposts after highlighting two — if not three — potential remote sleep options, now in application of the entire ride. When it works it not only doesn’t leave me all fucked up somewhere, it leaves me feeling joy.
Feeling resilient.
All these feels and I still gotta make this choice, pedaling with a third of a mile. I can see my turn and don’t know which way to go. I’ve got nothing to prove to the suburbs surrounding Chicago, if the canal trail went right downtown without traffic I’d probably choose otherwise… I ride right onto the train, strap my bike against the handrail, and take a seat riding backwards. Cue Graham Nash.
