The Train-Time Continuum (part 4)

People who drive their vehicle around cities have absolutely no idea how much more complex it is to do the same by bus or on foot — especially if you're carrying a pack. Busses, especially crowded busses, are just not pack-friendly. And they get downright unfriendly when you have your favorite chunk of cardboard along too. Just finding a bus is problematic. First you have to get to a street that looks like it might have busses running on it. If there are no bus benches on "your" corner, you figure that, maybe, the bus doesn't stop on every block, maybe every other block, so you walk a block or so in one direction. If you don't find any bus benches, then you turn around and walk back to where you started, then continue for a few blocks in the other direction. While you're way down here, you see a bus stop a few blocks back the way you came, and you realize that they don't have any bus benches around here, just those little signs on poles with some acronym for the local bus line on them, which, until now, you haven't been looking for.

If you do see a bus stopping nearby, you run as best as you can with the pack on and all, then find that it's not going where you want to go, but you figure any bus is better than no bus, so you squeeze your way past the rows of disapproving passengers, all the way to the back, where you plop down next to some junkie who's talking to himself, then two seconds later the driver hollers that here comes your stop, so you snake your way back up to the front, stumble down the steps, and find out that you can almost see where you first got on the bus from where you are now, and it cost you $2 to get there.

So it was, from the far west end of Minneapolis to the far east end, St. Paul, then down to South St. Paul, where the freightyard is that signals the end of your travels in civilization for awhile.

It was fortunate that I had all day to get to the yard, because that's about how long it took. Knowing from last year how disgusting the Mississippi River is adjacent to the yard, I resisted the urge to go for a swim, even though a bath in that yuckky water was sure to be an improvement in my general hygiene at that point. I found a shady spot to hang out, took off my boots and socks, and enjoyed a bottle of the finest wine that $4.95 could buy...

My southbound came in around 9:00pm and switched for a few hours, during which time just about every ridable car they brought in was set out, and I ended up getting on the lone piggyback car on the train, my only choice except for the second unit, which I wasn't quite desperate enough to go for yet. At some point we finally crawled out of the yard, and the trip down to Iowa was made entirely in darkness, so I hope I didn't miss any of the jaw-dropping scenery that this area is famous for. At daylight we slowed for what looked to be a medium-sized town, and I rolled up and got ready to detrain. I really had no idea where I was and, unlike driving on the Interstate, there were no informative signs along the roadbed to enlighten me, but I took a chance and dropped off the side, hoping to find somebody or something to identify my location. Walking up to the head end of the train I saw a sign saying Mason City, and breathed a sigh of relief. I was now a simple hitchhike away from Britt, so I washed up in a gas station restroom and headed out to the highway that ran east and west through town, knowing that, for this weekend anyway, I wouldn't need to make a sign saying "Britt", as my general appearance would speak volumes.

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