Mr. Harris' Wild Ride -- Part TWO: An Increasingly Endearing Narrative Concerning the American Railway System

In which the train she keeps on a-rolling, people from all over the world are crammed into a wee booth, and Mr. and Mrs. Harris continue to sleep the sleep of the innocent:

If you recall, Andy the Drunk bid us adieu, never to be seen again. Me, Kate the MSU freshmen, Mom, and Pop chatted idly as the train swayed from side to side. This lasted but a few moments. Katie was not tired and wanted to return to the observation room (club car in lower level) to play cards and wile away the hours as we approached her hometown (the midpoint on my illustrious train trip). I was not feeling tired yet, and she seemed to be of a sweet temperament and possibly enjoyable to spend a little more time with before sleeping off the remainder of the journey.

We stumbled on up a few cars and entered the observation room (club car in lower level) in order to, indeed, play some cards.

It is at this time that we are about to meet two key characters, and one person from Oregon who is barely worth mentioning.

Jeff and Nazy (this is not pronounced (though it may appear similar) like the nickname for the National Socialist German Workers' party (unless you are Winston Churchill, in which case, you would pronounce both exactly the same)). These were the two lovebirds who traveled all the way from California, almost certainly specifically to meet me. Jeff is a typical American who, upon meeting him, could have been from almost anywhere. A WASP with a made-for-TV accent and no discernible origination. Nazy on the other hand, could have come from no where but California and if it were possible, I would think that she was born on celluloid. Very goofy, not distractingly attractive, and with a voice that took me back to my youth with visions of The Joker's female sidekick Harley Quinn from the hit 90's animated serial: Batman Adventures. She was quite endearing, and they were both my kind of people.

I actually have to thank Katie the MSU freshmen for my ever having met them, as I was feeling anti-social (this is common for me when enduring any long form of travel) and would have just gone to sleep if only she would have been satisfied playing solitaire. She chose to sit in the booth directly across the aisle from the California couple and as they did turn out to be my kind of people, they, quite naturally, enfolded us within their conversation.

Turns out, they had taken a plane from Cali to Chi-Town, but, Nazy had never ridden a train before and dearly wanted to try it out. Jeff had business in Philadelphia, but also had time to spare and decided to give his dear wife of 3 years (did I mention they were man and wife? MAN AND WIFE!) the thrill of a lifetime, slopping along in too-tall train cars, dodging the Gestapo tactics of the Amtrak personnel, and eating "gourmet" pizza from the microwave in the club car (observation room in upper level).

We spent 2-3 hours attempting to play cards, but found all of us much too interesting to stop talking long enough to get that going. Jeff told us all about his job (can't remember off the top of my head exactly what it was he does) and Nazy clued us in on her half-Persian background and how to say several key insults in Farsi. We discussed subjects ranging from real estate opportunities across the country to politics to religion to what kind of flooring works best when you have a couple gigantic dogs and live five miles from the beach (an hour and a half by car). We took turns guarding the upper level while two of us would go downstairs, open the "do not open" windows, and send smoke hurtling out of our lungs and into the open air. Nazy wanted to go below and get stoned, but Jeff was much too nervous, despite the kind bud calling to him from their sleeper car.

Oh! Remember when I mentioned previously that apparently all train personnel are DICKS!?? I found out for sure via Jeff and Nazy. Think back also to when I said that the Kindly Kitchen Manager and the Nutty Conductor apologized profusely for not being able to show us what the sleeper cars looked like due to a full booking. Turns out it was all lies and they were all lazy!! Katie the MSU freshmen (still obsessed about seeing a sleeper car (turns out when she purchased her ticket online, she had struggled between choosing a seat in coach, and paying the extra $70-100 for a cozy mattress)) had mentioned our earlier exchange with said Amtrak employees and Jeff didn't hesitate for a moment to fill us in on the fact that more than half of the sleeper cars were totally unoccupied. Jeff and Nazy gave us the tour of the sleeper cars that Andy the Drunk had been unable to give us (did I or did I not tell you that in that part of Andy's tour, we had been turned away by the very same laborers who would 10-15 minutes later tell myself and Katie that there were no available rooms?). Most of them were quite tiny and seemed fairly unaccommodating, but there was one that was gigantic by comparison. Bigger than my apartment, but smaller than most people would like to stay for more than a few hours. The regular ones, such as the one rented by our new friends from California, consisted of the door to the aisle, a mirror and sink, enough room to stand up in front of two chairs with a table between them, and two pallets that folded down as beds (the lower one came down on top of the table, and i assume that you had to stand outside the room, in the aisle, in order to lower the bed and thusly crawl inside). Pretty neat though, really, if you were on a semi-romantic trip, such as I was not, and had plenty of time on your hands. We did go all the way up to the front of the train (where the locomotive is located) and peered through a window in the doorway to the control room. The interesting thing about this was that it was completely NOT interesting. It was like sitting in a glass bottom boat on a sidewalk. Interesting only because I can't explain why it this view looked so bland as I did not have the time to examine it further (the conductor's cabin was between us and the rest of the train and two in our group had gotten a bit jumpy (I don't want to come off as sexist, but, of course, I am talking about the girls.....))

We returned to the observation car (you know) where we finally settled in to several rousing hands of Bull$#!T. If you could hear me say the previous sentence aloud, you would catch the sarcasm when I uttered the word "rousing" for it was almost anything but. If not for our masterful conversational skills, this game may have become number one on my list of world's most boring games (up there with Risk, Settlers, and Scrabble) because the initial pile of cards would grow so quickly that we were all too panic-stricken to call anyone out for fear of collecting the bulk of the deck of cards into our shaky hands. After a few hands and a few verbal observations of the above sentence by various members of our party, the game did get a little more exciting, but then swung in the opposite direction -- in order to not let ourselves get stuck with an enormous amount of cards, we pretty much called out every attempt leave even one card on the table. Anyway... if you made it all the way through this paragraph, then you have a pretty good idea of the exact emotion we were feeling in regard to the game.

¡viva conversación!

I could go on and on about Jeff and Nazy (INVESTMENT BROKER!!! YES!!! That's what Jeff is!) but I'm not going to. Instead I'm going to mention how Katie the MSU freshmen was becoming more and more tired throughout the last few hours and reverting in age exponentially. (I actually almost forgot about this entirely thanks to the calming affect of the presence of the California Kids) Turns out that, basically, she becomes one the most annoying slap-happy people you could ever meet and so foul-mouthed for her innocent looks that it even embarrassed me a little bit (she wasn't bad by modern standards, but it was shocking in the way that seeing a 5-year-old strangle an injured puppy is shocking). If more than a few pleasant moments of silence went by, she would compulsively void this silence by whistling about 5 and half bars of Grease tunes. Also, she became very sassy to Jeff and me. And not in a way that is humorous or cute, but in a way that made us wait till she looked away so that we could raise our brows, eyes gaping and snort laughter to deal with the pain and suffering that we had somehow become forced to endure. Eventually I took it upon myself to make simple, snide remarks that made her feel foolish for behaving in some of her more obnoxious ways and she settled down. Although, possibly this had less to do with me and more to do with the fact that we had arrived in an area very close to Katie's hometown and she became distracted from her task of annoying us and more interested in playing to her better qualities (one of which is an impressive love of her hometown that I regret to realize few possess) and pointing out familiar landmarks that were important to herself and to Pennsylvania as a whole.

Jeff, Nazy, and Katie all got off on the next stop, never to be seen again.

Thus ends chapter two. Be with us next time for the pulse-pounding continuation of this ever-lengthening tale wherein I sleep off the remainder of the journey, we arrive at yet another train station, I mention a few things about this and that, and potentially some things that you may not have been expecting might occur.