Our alternate Amtrak transportation on Sunday March 19
March 24, 2023
We made this trip to Chicago to use up our timeshare points since we waited too long to book South Beach and because a trip to Chicago on the Amtrak would refresh my memory of the route prior to beginning this summer’s Trails And Rails program. The plan was to take Amtrak down on Sunday, spend four nights at the Hilton Grand Vacation Club location in the Doubletree hotel, and then return on Amtrak Thursday, March 23.
I try not to dump on Amtrak too much. After all, air travel is full of hassles also. However, Amtrak‘s on-time record for the Empire Builder going east from Seattle to Saint Paul to Chicago is poor. The train is normally late, sometimes dramatically so. The Amtrak app gives an overly optimistic view of the time the train will arrive in Minneapolis St. Paul. I use another program that tracks the Empire Builder’s journey once it leaves Seattle. For this trip, while the train left Seattle on time Friday early evening, east of Spokane it encountered a delay and was running 3 1/2 hours late. It never made up the time as it traveled further east.
Saturday afternoon around 4 PM we received an email from Amtrak that while the train was running late, they had made alternate arrangements for us. Turns out they had arranged for a nice coach bus to take us directly to Chicago. We should still show up at our usual departure time Sunday morning at Saint Paul’s Union Depot. This left some questions for us, but we were willing to go with the flow. Sunday morning we arrived at Union Depot and after talking to the Amtrak agent we learned we could either take the bus or wait for the train. At this point the train was scheduled to be about 3 1/2 hours late. (It ended up being 5 1/2 hours late.) We talked to some people in the waiting area and discovered that 35 students and chaperones from Richfield Senior High were going down to Chicago for two nights on a class trip. We ended up taking the bus with them. Our belief is that the bus was only arranged because there were so many people going directly to Chicago. A second bus was arranged for people going to intermediate stops, including Milwaukee. But our bus would go directly to Chicago.
The bus left around 9 AM, made a one hour lunch stop in Wisconsin Dells, and arrived in Chicago’s Union Station about a half hour sooner than the train would have. That is, sooner than the train would have arrived if it were on time. Since the train was actually over five hours late, we got to Chicago six hours earlier than if we had waited for the train. We took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, and had dinner at an Irish sports bar (O’Toole’s) across the street. Chris had their shepherd’s pie while I had their meat loaf. Both were very tasty. While we were on the 23rd floor, the view was only of downtown office buildings, so not as dramatic as the view in San Francisco.
Monday morning we walked to a local breakfast place called Yolks. Great breakfast menu and it offered a carafe of 32 ounces of milk for $10. What a deal. We ordered it of course. We had only one scheduled activity for the day which was the Adler planetarium. There was a taxi outside the hotel, and we took it down to the Adler, part of the museum complex in Chicago.
At the Adler
The Adler planetarium was the first planetarium to open in the United States and did so in 1930. It has several floors of exhibits and theaters. We paid for one planetarium show called planet nine about Pluto and other planetary like bodies in the Kuiper belt area of the solar system. We found the exhibits well done covering some topics we knew such as moon exploration, but numerous topics that we had no concept of prior to our visit. One such new item was “retes”, which are pierced plates on an astrolabe. Hopefully we walked away remembering some of that information. Monday afternoon was probably the nicest day, weatherwise, and we walked 3 miles back from the museum complex to our hotel.
Walking back from the Adler
Pop Up book of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Tuesday we changed our plan a bit and took a tour of the Newberry library. The Newberry is a private research library devoted to the humanities, renowned in its field and in genealogy. We had a tour of the library which dates back to 1887. We viewed the original building but not the archival section which is off-limits. They had an exhibition of book arts, the process of creating fold up and pop up books. We are used to these nowadays as more of a children’s book with pop-up pictures. However, the history of these goes back hundreds of years and it was interesting to see the origins and variety that have been created as publishing skills have expanded. Another special exhibit presented the perspective of black and indigenous artists and how their art has shown resilience and resistance in the face of oppression.
The tour of the Newberry had a particularly curious twist. Mr. Newberry, another one of those millionaires with too much money to spend, left his money for a library. As Chris would say, long story short, he died on a boat trip to Europe to meet his free spending wife and two daughters. A superstition of the time was to have a dead body on board a ship. Given his wealth, people accompanying the trip convinced the captain to stuff his body into a barrel that had been emptied of it’s cargo of rum. The barrel was then lashed to the side of the boat. He and his barrel were transported to England, where his body greeted his wife and daughters. The docent did not describe how the body got back to Chicago for eventual burial.
Chicago dining, from upper left, Palmer House, Giordano’s, Billy Goat Tavern, at Yolk, at O’Toole’s
For lunch, we walked a few blocks down Rush Street to Giordano‘s pizza, a Chicago institution since 1974. Once there we discovered they have expanded so much there is a location only a few miles from us in Richfield MN. Since their deep dish pizza is famous but would take an hour to create, we had the thin crust pizza with a salad, and were quite pleased.
Chris liked this from the Museum of Contemporary Art
After that, we walked over to the Museum of Contemporary Art. This was kind of a snoozer, I would’ve been happy to have skipped it. A lot of space, but not much art that spoke to me. In fact, not much art at all given the size of the building.
Sue
Wednesday morning started with our having the breakfast buffet in the hotel restaurant which gave us a chance to have fruit, vegetables, protein, etc. to fortify ourselves for a busy day. After breakfast, we took another taxi to the museum complex, this time to visit the Field Museum of Natural History. The Field dates back to 1894. It is one of the largest natural history museums in the world. Here we purchased the special exhibit about China, and also had an hour tour focusing on dinosaurs. Their main dinosaur, called Sue, is a Tyrannosaurus rex found in South Dakota, and named after the female archaeologist, Sue Henderson, who was the first to spot the bones of the dinosaur. The docent gave a very knowledgeable talk about the mass extinctions that led to, and killed off, the dinosaur, as well as the various types of dinosaurs that existed during the time frame they inhabited the earth.
Other exhibits were equally well done and extensive. We spent five hours here and by the time we got back to the hotel, I was pretty well wiped out. Not too wiped out, though, as we explored a dive type hamburger place located on a dingy lower level street. For some reason I thought at the Billy Goat Tavern, I could get a great burger and tater tots. But no, the burger was good, but it was only chips as your optional accompaniment. I made up for it by stopping at a little deli next to our hotel, and picking up some chocolate chip cookies and milk.
At the American Writers Museum
Thursday was our last day in town. We slept in, and then spent an hour at the American Writers Museum. This museum opened in 2017, and has a series of static and interactive displays of a wide range of American writers. They even had a section of manual typewriters where younger people visiting had a chance to find out how to properly insert a piece of paper in the typewriter so you type on the page with the logo at the top front. They also had difficulty understanding that you had to hit the keys smartly in order to make an impression. It was a bit of humor to watch among the multitude of displays about individual writers.
We had lunch at the Palmer house, another Chicago institution before heading to Union Station to catch our Amtrak home. The homebound train was only about 10 minutes late leaving the station. It was kind of a madhouse in the waiting room, but everything got sorted out smoothly as people were directed to the proper car for the journey west. We spent over half the time in the observation car enjoying the scenery. Only major hiccup was a male rider who appear to have some mental health issues. The train was stopped in Tomah, Wisconsin to escort him off the train for violating the no smoking rule, among other things.
We arrived back in Saint Paul about 11:15 p.m. There were no taxis wedding, so we dialed up an Uber and got home a little bit after midnight. Next trip, Arizona and Nevada for Great Basin National Park, and visiting family.
Walking back from the Adler to our hotel in downtown Chicago
Ed and Chris, Saint Paul, March 25
Chris Klejbuk and Ed Heimel travel adventure 
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