Epic East Coast - Day 7

Today was not a very good day, as I am quickly souring on traveling by train, especially with young children.  Everything seems to conspire to make it harder for us.  There is really no easy access to trains without escalators, the wireless doesn't even work for simple web searches, the food is awful, the bathrooms disgusting, the people on the train seem to think that any conversation is too much, and we were two hours late getting into Charlotte, turning a decent 8:15pm arrival (around bedtime) into a 10:15pm arrival (with kids that were overtired and exhausted).

We started off the day by getting up at 5:00am in order to make it to Penn Station by 6:00am for our 7:00am train.  That all worked fine, except Penn Station is not designed for you to arrive early and wait for your train - it is designed to efficiently move a lot of people.  There is a big open area with escalators down to each pair of tracks and 10 minutes before your train leaves, the track number goes up on the board and everyone takes the escalator down and gets on.  So most people arrive about 15 minutes before their train leaves.  I found an elevator, but it only goes down to one pair of tracks, so if your train is on a different pair, it is a long walk around to get to it, so we decided to fold up the stroller and carry it down the escalator.  That worked, though there were so many people on our train, that I worried about losing the kids as we went down, but we managed to get on the train and get six seats together.

Then it was a long boring ride to Charlotte.  We brought food that we bought in New York, but Jonathan threw a fit instead of eating it, so I sent him to Sandra, as she had a little more patience than I, and during that shuffle, I noticed the lady in front of us composing an e-mail about how Amtrak was so loud.  *sigh*

We ended up letting the kids play video games the majority of the trip.  My original plan, before we left, was to let them watch Netflix the entire trip, but the wireless sucks and even if it didn't, it has Netflix blocked to avoid saturating the network.  Everyone else on the train uses their phones, but that isn't a great option for us Canadians thanks to the super expensive roaming data fees.

Anyway, we finally arrived in Charlotte at 10:15pm.  I phoned for a cab that offered minivan rides, and we took that to our hotel, which is downtown.  We got checked in, somehow calmed the kids down and put everyone to bed.  Unfortunately for me, I had the sniffles on the train, which I thought was due to the air conditioning, but no, it turns out I have managed to catch a cold somewhere, which is fantastic when it is 37 degrees out and I'm about to drive a race car.  Tomorrow is a rest day before the excitement of Saturday, so hopefully we will all have some time to get some rest.