September 14-15, 2014

The Journey home

When I got into the room last night, there was a message on my room’s phone thanking me for staying at Pop Century.  That if I made any charges back to the room, which I did, if I provided a email address, which I did, they will email me a list of room charges instead of leaving a copy on the door. Sure enough, when I woke up this am, got a email with a PDF file of my room charges, all looked legit.

I just threw all my things into the suitcase and backpack.  I wound up with one bag of items that couldn’t fit elsewhere.  I had to leave the room by 11 am.  I called the scooter people about 9:30.  The driver had me scheduled to have the scooter picked up by 10:30, but they got another driver there in a couple of minutes, and I handed back the scooter.

After double and triple checking, I vacated the room at 10:50 am.  I got some last orange soda with my refillable mug and waited for my car service to pick me up, which they did just after 12.  I was in the train station by 12:30. 

inside Orlando Station

Train is running on time and got there 1:25 pm. Here is my video of the Silver Meteor entering Orlando Station.

I had lunch as soon as we started to pull out of the station. 

My usual cheeseburger with potato chips.

And for dessert….

chocolate mousse, I think (don’t remember)

I had dinner while we were in Jacksonville. Start with a salad.

entrée is steak….

and dessert.

chocolate mousse

We were pulling a private car, so we had to do some things to drop the car off at Jacksonville.  This just delayed us a couple of minutes because we pulled north of the station, then went backwards back into the station.

After dinner, I retired back to my roomette and setup my bed and laid down for a bit.  Maybe slept a bit, not sure.  I got up around 11 to watch some DVD’s I brought with me.  It is a courtesy even in the sleepers to use earphones when listening to electronics.  My laptop has Bluetooth, so was using Bluetooth stereo earphones to watch things on my laptop.  Not a problem on the trip south.  But on the trip north, I had some problems getting it to work.  It wouldn’t pair, and I couldn’t deactivate the bluetooth to try and reset it.  While working on that, the Wi-Fi died on the laptop... ARRGGGGHHHHHH.  So I am on a train doing about 79 mph with a malfunctioning laptop.  I am not the type of person to leave a problem like this until morning.  So I spent the next two hours trying to get it to work again.  One on hand, Windows 8 said everything was ok with the wifi adapter, but I couldn’t get it to turn on.  Long story short, I took out the midsize hammer, uninstalled the adapter, rebooted the laptop, and it reloaded and the adapter started to work again.  I do have to reprogram security settings for all the Wi-fi hot spots I used, but it’s a minor inconvenience.

I went into the upper bunk around 2 am and fell asleep for about 4 hours.  They announced the dinner car is now serving breakfast.  I decided to just sleep and skip breakfast.  My roomette did seem allot more crowded with just one bag.

Empire State Building in the distance

We were pretty close to on time.  We were due to arrive NY Penn just after 11 am, we pulled in 11:25 am.  Not bad at all for a long journey.

I exited the train, took a escalator up from the platform and walked down the corridor to leave Penn Station. I walked to 6th ave and 34 st to enter NYC Subway, F train to Coney Island.

subway train announcing where it is heading

When I see the hills of the Cyclone, I am home.

And that’s all folks :)