Meet Me At The Station

October 11, 2015

A dim light woke me as it crept in through the small opening of the train window. Unlike most windows, this one makes up the entire wall as I lay beside it.  I open the curtain to watch the scenery, trying to pull myself out of sleep. From my eyes to my toes the world rushes past at great speed. If drifting in and out of dreams, it almost feels as though you are flying on your own--the grandness of reality and the hopes of dreams happily colliding momentarily. Jason climbed down to join me as we watched the sun come up. It was a lovely morning.

We soon turned the beds back into seats, dressed, and readied ourselves for breakfast. We walked down to the dinning car and found a small booth all to ourselves. This was the first time on our journey where we ate alone. Below is a picture:
  

Jason and I both ordered the microwave french toast with sugar-free syrup. It was delicious... for a microwave pastry. I ordered some orange juice and Jason got a cup of hot coffee. He was nervous to drink a cup of hot liquid while being bumped up and down by a train. It was pretty entertaining. We then returned to our room where we enjoyed the scenery back to Georgia. We were only a few hours away by this point. Below is a picture:

Jason and I kept ourselves entertained as we waited for our stop. We soon realized the speaker in our room was not working. On the way up to Boston, a man would announce each stop and where we were. This time, however, there were no announcements. We started paying close attention to each stop, looking for signs indicating where were were. In no time, we realized our stop would be coming up. We decided to open the door to our room so we could catch the attendant on his way down. Unlike the attendant before, this guy was rarely seen and did not offer to turn down (or up?) our beds. Eventually, the attendant came by and told us our stop was coming up. We grabbed our luggage and got ready.

As we arrived in Atlanta, Jason and I rolled our luggage down the hall toward the exit. We got in line behind a woman who was also waiting to leave. She was having a conversation with our attendant, who was reading a book in his room. Upon seeing us, the attendant offered to take our luggage for us so we could get off without worrying. I was worried about the broom sticking out of our suitcase. He wasn't very careful and I saw the broom bend backward quite a bit. Luckily, however, it made it just fine. Our attendant lowered all the suitcases and then helped each of us down. We grabbed our things and quickly made our way to the station. Below is a picture of Jason, showing how very tired we were:

This is the face of someone so happy to be home, and so not looking forward to climbing stairs with a zillion suitcases. We saw an elevator but decided it would take too long, since there were too many people waiting. We grabbed our things and made our way to the wooden benches where our journey originally began.  Below are two more pictures. I would like to note, everyone was standing in a line smoking as we passed by them. It was so thoughtful for them to blow cancer right at us, especially since there was no other way to get around them. Welcome to Atlanta Bitches!

I texted my mom, as she was scheduled to pick us up. I had been texting her throughout the morning because we were uncertain when the train would be arriving. I had asked our waiter at breakfast and he said we were 45 minutes late. Shortly before arriving, however, our attendant informed us we were on time. I texted mom when we arrived and she, being ever so smart, was close by and had left early. 

We met her outside the door, loaded up the car, and headed home. As we drove through Atlanta we began to notice the streets were brightly decorated in rainbow colors. It was Sunday so there weren't many people out, but the decorations confused us. Finally Jason realized--the Gay Pride Parade was later today. Very cool way to come home! We got to see all the decorations going up as we made our way down the empty streets.

Mom offered to take us to breakfast, but we had already eaten. In no time we were home. Mom was great and helped us with our luggage and came in to visit the kitties. Below are pictures of our return:

The cats were so happy we were home. They cuddles us and kept us company. We thanked mom and she headed off. Jason and I then spend the rest of the morning unpacking and walking around the house--we were trying to get as many steps in for our fitbit goal. Trains are not conducive to exercise. Soon we became hungry. We decided to go to Einstein Bagels, the same place we had lunch right before leaving for our trip. Perfect circle. Below is a picture:

Honestly, we are writing this so long after our trip that we are uncertain what happened for the rest of the day. We think we just went walking and ate at Panera for Dinner. That was about it. We were home and that was all that mattered.

I do want to say, when I finally turned the calendar over to October, I saw this:

For Always Day :^) Jason is amazing. Happy 5th anniversary to us! :^)