Planes, Trains, and Ex-Con's

Whoa. Dude, I'm in like...Seattle and stuff. And very quickly absorbing the local flava. It's a really cool place, with Asian people, hippies, and Asian people who are Hippies. The ride out however, was not cool. As you might have known (from the hyper explicit post below), we started this adventure by train, a train which was naturally late. When it did eventually get to Springfield I had been at the train station for an hour and a half. Sadly, this would set the precedence for the trip. Once aboard said train, I had to fight my way to the car that Mr. Barry was sitting in. I think somehow he ended up in business class. Because he was in a way nice car than I had been in. Unfortunately we ended up with a confirmed psycopath and drug addict in the seats behind us.

All of that didn't come out of course, until the accident. Apparently the train ahead of us was hauling toxic waste. And I kid you not, there was a hazardous material spill on the tracks. We were stuck. It was now up the the brilliant people who make their living pressing the "go forward" button in the front of the train to figure out what we would do about this. One hour later they decided we would take a different set of tracks. So we backed up and got on freight tracks, then we had to wait for someone qualified to "pilot the train on these different tracks" to which I replied "Just close your friggin eyes and pretend you're on your own tracks". Carl Windslow (my pet name for the conductor in our area) was not amused. It took just a little while (in the geologic sense) for them to figure out that the tracks we were on did not lead to union station. And just a bit longer than that to figure out that the guy who switches the tracks had gone home for the night and that we were stuck.

By this time pandamonium had broken out, we were now 3 hours behind schedual. People were pissed. Irrational things started happening. The Coked out girl (who was pretty clearly on drugs when she got on, and indeed was sighted eating some foreign substance) took some more drugs. The ex-con type psyco behind us started using even more profanity (which meant that the only not profane words in his vocabulary were now "the" "son" and "mother") he also told us about how he screwed a Vancouver girl in Vegas, were we could get hash in British Colombia, and how cool those "fucking granola guys" who live in Seattle are. He also regaled us with the story of how he got fired from his last job for getting in a fight with a 500 pound black guy who just so happened to get on the train with us. And how if he said one thing to him, the ex-con would "rip off his head, skull f- him and shit down his throat". Lovely heartwarming togetherness in the face of adversity. This is the guy they screened for at NASA when they were going to be putting people on tiny capsules for days at a time.

Eventually the Amtrak people deicded that the best way to head off a riot was to offer free consessions in the snack car. Sadly, this too backfired as the entire train bumrushed the front car. It was really primal, I expected someone to kill a weaker passenger to establish dominance over the snack car territory. As soon as all was calm we noticed we were moving again... PAST Chicago. We went miles out of our way to the next switch over, then backed the train all the way to Union Station. Finally there, Barrett and I ran screaming from the train. We wanted to be damn sure not to stick around psyco guy or drug chick. It was still a few hours till our flight, so we got in touch with Josh and he came and picked us up from the station. We then spent 3 hours at Elmhurst (there's a really funny story about what happened there, but I'll tell it later in the comment section because I'm about to go kayaking) before we had to leave for the airport. Once we got on our flights, things went much smoother than the train, but considering the fact that for things to go worse the wings of the plane would have had to fall off, this was no great feat.

Anyway, we're now out in Seattle. We've been to the Space Needle, I've take lude pictures. One of Nathan's friends saw Kristin Kreuk in a trendy cafe a while back. Apparently she gave him the "shhh" finger to the lips and he gave her the "I won't tell but later on you have to make out with me" head nod. We went to a hospital where they have a slide and slid down it like 20 times. Laughing all the way. Then I loudly pointed out how only a healthy person could climb the rediculously steep steps and survive the rough voyage down the slide itself, so it's more of a motivation to get well than something to entertain the sick people. Which basically is cruel, like having an ice cream stand at a fat camp, or a "not eating" stand at an annorexic camp. And with that, I'm out of time for blogging today. It's now time to go have more adventures in Seattle. Dude... I'm like totally out...

- Scott