Road Tripping: Let’s Acela-rate*

There was the time my roommate and I got stranded by the bus six miles away from our apartment in Ithaca. There was the time I tried to fly out of Ithaca in winter. There was the time my bus disappeared.¹ This time, my travel plans involved no planes because it’s more trouble to fly from Ann Arbor (Detroit) to Chicago and no buses because there were no buses running. That’s right; my latest brilliantly thought out travel plans included journeying on Memorial Day. In my defense, I had planned to travel on Tuesday, but when I went to buy tickets, the Amtrak site gave me an error after I entered all my credit card information. I didn’t want to be double charged, so I waited until the next day to try again, at which point all the Tuesday tickets were sold out. Besides travelling on Memorial Day, I also thought it would be a good idea to take a train that left Ann Arbor at 7 in the morning.

Sunrise

Shockingly enough, the buses were not running on Memorial Day, especially at 6 in the morning. But I eventually made it to the train station, seeing the sunrise on the way, and had a smooth ride to Chicago. Yes, I said smooth. I had plenty of space, more than on the bus, it was quieter, and we didn’t have to sit in traffic. There were no detours through New Mexico, no attacks from monster geese, and no freak June snowstorms. The train was about half full on this trip. It made three stops between Ann Arbor and Chicago and arrived at Union Station pretty much on time.

We didn’t have a lot planned for my first day in Chicago; my mom met me at Union Station, we waited for my cousin to arrive on a different train, then we went back to my brother’s condo. We all had lunch together then walked around Millennium Park and along the river. My mom, my brother, and I finished out the day with dim sum for dinner and Shaun the Sheep back at the condo.

*The train I rode was not the Acela Express, which refers to the Amtrak route along the Northeast corridor between Boston and Washington, DC. I rode the Wolverine, which goes between Pontiac and Chicago via Ann Arbor and Detroit. The post title comes from a math challenge some math team friends and I voluntarily participated in one weekend in high school. The problem involved the Acela Express and train speeds and money, and yes, we obviously made that pun all day.

¹Moral of the story: I would make a terrible travelling companion.