“Sixty-five inches?” I shouted. “You can’t be serious.”
Amtrak’s Booth Nazi curled her lips into a snarl and she enunciated slowly to assure that I, an apparent moron, understood. “Like I said, lady Your – car – is – too – tall.”
“But six weeks ago Amtrak’s Phone Voice told me that our sixty-five inch SUV wasn’t too tall. Now you’re saying it is? How can that be?” I asked.
She responded with the compassion of a drill sergeant. I half expected her to yawn. “I haven’t the foggiest. That’ll be an additional two hundred thirty five dollars,” she said.
Smoke shooting from my ears must have caught her attention. “Okay, okay,” she said, “we’ll make it one hundred fourteen dollars – and leave your keys in the car.” she ordered. “An attendant will load it onto the train.”
Phone Voice had also said we’d be locking our own car, which prompted us to feel comfortable leaving our laptop, DVD player and GPS on car seats, in plain view. An attendant driving our car was not on our list of Things That Make Us Happy.
We gritted our teeth and headed for the train.
From the doorway of our cabin, we surveyed our state room and determined that we would best fit into the room if we first exhaled. To say the cabin was small would be inaccurate. It was microscopic. If I hadn’t lost four pounds before the trip I wouldn’t have fit into the bathroom. As I lowered myself onto the john, my hips rubbed against the walls on either side. It occurred to me that along with car height, butt measurements should also have been a requirement. A sign on the right of the toilet pointed to an overhead nozzle and shower head, signifying that I could shower and pee at the same time. Multitasking at its best.
We couldn’t figure out how to pull our beds out of the wall. Mighty Marc tugged, yanked and pushed but nothing budged. So we changed into our night clothes, then rang for a porter. When he appeared, we stepped outside our cabin so he could fit in, barely, and watched in amazement as he accommodated for lack of space by transforming himself into a human pretzel, then pulled the beds out, and spread sheets and blankets over each – all the while balanced on one foot in fourteen inches of available floor space. Task completed, he sucked in his stomach and slid out of the cabin door. We climbed onto the lower bed and crawled to the window.
“Oh Marc,” I said, as I snuggled close to him. “The moon is so bright. Isn’t this romantic? Just like Ruth Roman and Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train.”
I saw a twinkle in his eye and he pulled me closer. “Sure is, Vernie.” He sighed and stared out at the black, star-filled sky. “Wanna count passing telephone poles?”
So much for romance.
The ladder to Mighty Marc’s upper berth was six inches from my face, in the lower berth. It was 3:00 AM when, in the dim shadow of our nightlight, two hairy objects appeared in front of my nose. My screams were reminiscent of those shrieked by Janet Leigh, in Psycho. I soon realized that these hairy objects supported my husband on his way down the ladder, to the bathroom.
The rest of the night I held on to that ladder for life as we bumped our way down the east coast. There were times I felt certain we’d jumped the tracks and were riding roughshod through a rock quarry.
After breakfast we took our place among 473 others waiting for 248 cars. A voice over the loud speaker repeated a call for several people to pick up their car adding, “If these cars aren’t claimed soon they’ll be donated to employees.”
One family picked up their little Volkswagen and drove off with what had to be all of their worldly belongings. So many items were strapped to every available space, in and out of their car, you couldn’t tell what color it was. Suitcases, furniture, bicycles, paintings, crates and even a motorcycle, protruded from windows and the trunk. Modern day pioneers.
It was an 18 hour adventure that we’d do it again, but next time with a shorter car and a smaller butt.
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