Monthly Archives: October 2015

The Train to Galesburg

Family, Travel

Sometimes, children are so excited you just can’t resist. Jacob and Oliver have been begging for a train trip for awhile now, so Laura and I took advantage of a day off school to take them to the little town of Galesburg, IL for a couple days.

Galesburg is a special memory for me; nearly 5 years ago, it was the first time Jacob and I took an Amtrak trip somewhere, just the two of us. And, separately, Laura’s first-ever train trip had been to Galesburg to visit friends.

There was excitement in the air. I was asked to supply a bedtime story about trains — I did. On the way to the train station — in the middle of the night — there was excited jabbering about trains. Even when I woke them up, they lept out of bed and raced downstairs, saying, “Dad, why aren’t you ready yet?”

As the train was passing through here at around 4:45AM, and we left home with some time to spare, we did our usual train trip thing of stopping at the one place open at such a time: Druber’s Donuts.

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Much as Laura and I might have enjoyed some sleep once we got on the train, Jacob and Oliver weren’t having it. Way too much excitement was in the air. Jacob had his face pressed against the window much of the time, while Oliver was busy making “snake trains” from colored clay — complete with eyes.

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The boys were dressed up in their train hats and engineer overalls, and Jacob kept musing about what would happen if somebody got confused and thought that he was the real engineer. When an Amtrak employee played along with that later, he was quite thrilled!

We were late enough into Galesburg that we ate lunch in the dining car. A second meal there — what fun! Here they are anxiously awaiting the announcement that the noon reservations could make their way to the dining car. Oh, and jockeying for position to see who would be first and get to do the all-important job of pushing the button to open the doors between train cars.

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Even waiting for your food can be fun.

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Upon arriving, we certainly couldn’t leave the train station until our train did, even though it was raining.

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Right next to the train station is the Discovery Depot Children’s Museum. It was a perfect way to spend a few hours. Jacob really enjoyed the building wall, where you can assemble systems that use gravity (really a kinetic/potential energy experiment wall) to funnel rubber balls all over the place. He sticks out his tongue when he’s really thinking. Fun to watch.

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Meanwhile, Oliver had a great time with the air-powered tube system, complete with several valves that can launch things through a complicated maze of transparent tubes.

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They both enjoyed pretending I was injured and giving me rides in the ambulance. I was diagnosed with all sorts of maladies — a broken leg, broken nose. One time Jacob held up the pretend stethoscope to me, and I said “ribbit.” He said, “Dad, you’ve got a bad case of frog! You will be in the hospital 190 days!” Later I would make up things like “I think my gezotnix is all froibled” and I was ordered to never leave the ambulance again. He told the story of this several times.

After the museum closed, we ate supper. Keep in mind the boys had been up since the middle of the night without sleeping and were still doing quite well! They did start to look a bit drowsy — I thought Oliver was about to fall asleep, but then their food came. And at the hotel, they were perfectly happy to invent games involving jumping off the bed.

Saturday, we rode over to Peck Park. We had heard about this park from members of our church in Kansas, but oddly even the taxi drivers hadn’t ever heard of it. It’s well known as a good place to watch trains, as it has two active lines that cross each other at a rail bridge. And sure enough, in only a little while, we took in several trains.

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The rest of that morning, we explored Galesburg. We visited an antique mall and museum, saw the square downtown, and checked out a few of the shops — my favorite was the Stray Cat, featuring sort of a storefront version of Etsy with people selling art from recycled objects. But that wasn’t really the boys’ thing, so we drifted out of there on our way to lunch at Baked, where we had some delicious deep-dish pizza.

After that, we still had some time to kill before getting back on the train. We discussed our options. And what do you know — we ended up back at the children’s museum. We stopped at a bakery to get the fixins for a light supper on the train, and ate a nice meal in the dining car once we got on. Then, this time, they actually slept.

Before long, it was 3AM again and time to get back off the train. Oliver was zonked out sleepy. Somehow I managed to get his coat and backpack on him despite him being totally limp, and carried him downstairs to get off the train. Pretty soon we walked to our car and drove home.

We tucked them in, and then finally tucked ourselves in. Sometimes being really tired is well worth it.

Objects On Earth Are Closer Than They Appear

Aviation

“We all live beneath the great Big Dipper.”

So goes a line in a song I once heard the great Tony Brown sing. As I near the completion of my private pilot’s training, I’ve had more and more opportunities to literally see the wisdom in those words. Here’s a story of one of them.

Night

“A shining beacon in space — all alone in the night.”

– Babylon 5

A night cross-country flight, my first, taking off from a country airport. The plane lifts into the dark sky. The bright white lights of the runway get smaller, and disappear as I pass the edge of the airport. Directly below me, it looks like a dark sky; pitch black except for little pinpoints of light at farmhouses and the occasional car. But seconds later, an expanse of light unfolds, from a city it takes nearly an hour to reach by car. Already it is in sight, and as I look off to other directions, other cities even farther away are visible, too. The ground shows a square grid, the streets of the city visible for miles.

There are no highway signs in the sky. There are no wheels to keep my plane pointed straight. Even if I point the plane due south, if there is an east wind, I will actually be flying southwest. I use my eyes, enhanced by technology like a compass, GPS, and VHF radio beacons, to find my way. Before ever getting into the airplane, I have carefully planned my route, selecting both visual and technological waypoints along the way to provide many ways to ensure I am on course and make sure I don’t get lost.

Soon I see a flash repeating every few seconds in the distance — an airport beacon. Then another, and another. Little pinpoints of light nestled in the square orange grid. Wichita has many airports, each with its beacon, and one of them will be my first visual checkpoint of the night. I make a few clicks in the cockpit, and soon the radio-controlled lights at one of the airports spring to life, illuminating my first checkpoint. More than a mile of white lights there to welcome any plane that lands, and to show a point on the path of any plane that passes.

I continue my flight, sometimes turning on lights at airports, other times pointing my plane at lights from antenna towers (that are thousands of feet below me), sometimes keeping a tiny needle on my panel centered on a radio beacon. I land at a tiny, deserted airport, and then a few minutes later at a large commercial airport.

On my way back home, I fly solely by reference to the ground — directly over a freeway. I have other tools at my disposal, but don’t need them; the steady stream of red and white lights beneath me are all I need.

From my plane, there is just red and white. One after another, passing beneath me as I fly over them at 115 MPH. There is no citizen or undocumented immigrant, no rich or poor, no atheist or Christian or Muslim, no Democrat or Replubican, no American or Mexican, no adult or child, no rich or poor, no Porsche or Kia. Just red and white points of light, each one the same as the one before and the one after, stretching as far as I can see into the distance. All alike in the night.

You only need to get a hundred feet off the ground before you realize how little state lines, national borders, and the machinery of politics and exclusion really mean. From the sky, the difference between a field of corn and a field of wheat is far more significant than the difference between Kansas and Missouri.

This should be a comforting reminder to us. We are all unique, and beautiful in our uniqueness, but we are all human, each as valuable as the next.

Up in the sky, even though my instructor was with me, during quiet times it is easy to feel all alone in the night. But I know it is not the case. Only a few thousand feet separate my plane from those cars. My plane, too, has red and white lights.

How often at night, when the heavens were bright,
With the light of the twinkling stars
Have I stood here amazed, and asked as I gazed,
If their glory exceed that of ours.

– John A. Lomax