We got up late as usual. We reserved a late 2pm lunch. In this bigger Roomette with my own window I am able to sit up on my bunk and use my computer while also watching the scenery go by. This enabled me to watch several hours of Star Trek Voyager while also getting some great photos of rivers, rusted bridges, and tumble down shacks.
At lunch I had some more mediocre food. This time pork stew on rice. The food on the train is OK, but that’s about all you can say about it. It’s 1000 times better than plane food though. I can’t even eat plane food... these Amtrak meals are at least edible and mildly pleasant tasting. The desserts are great though. I’ve had a chocolate cheesecake which was delicious, and I don’t even really like cheesecake. The tira misu was pretty good too, but now I’ve settled into a routine of eating Haagen Daaz chocolate ice cream after every meal. This was my last Amtrak meal for this leg of the trip though.
The train became three hours behind schedule today. Since Amtrak only leases the railways from freight companies it is subject to delays when freight trains take priority. I guess that is what happened with my train. It didn’t matter to me though, I was quite comfortable watching my Star Trek Voyagers. Three more hours is three more episodes to watch with nice scenery outside. It’s nice not being in any kind of hurry.
We finally arrived at New York Penn Station at 8:30pm. Now we had to haul our ridiculously heavy baggage to our hotel in New Jersey. I had a reservation for a hotel in Jersey mainly cause I’m frugal. And being frugal I had two options: a) stay in New York at a cheap, seedy, loud, conveniently located hotel, or b) stay in Jersey in a cheap, nice, quiet, inconveniently located hotel. I don’t like seedy or loud so I went with the New Jersey option. In retrospect I should have found a hotel in Brooklyn near where our cruise ship leaves, considering our heavy bags... but that’s a problem and an ordeal for Monday! Hehehe.
So we began our trek with our 67lb bag, and other heavy bag down 2 blocks of NY city to find the PATH station. We found it with no problems, and took the PATH to New Jersey Penn Station. At this point our arms were very tired and so we decided to taxi the rest of the way to the hotel, the luxurious ;p Days Hotel Newark Airport! Anyway, we were very happy to finally get to the hotel around 10:30pm. I took a long, well deserved shower and was happy to get online once again!
Our long time friend Michael finally made it to the hotel as well. He grew up with us in San Diego but now lives outside Boston, MA. Since none of us had yet eaten dinner we went to a 24 hour diner at midnight to get something to eat. The diner was called Mike’s Unicorn Diner, and it had Greek-American food. The three of us enjoyed catching up on things, and made it back to the hotel and in bed around 2am. Sadly, too late for us to get enough sleep for the next day. Oh well. I'm sure we can sleep in on Saturday.
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