Anyway, I digress. As Sophomore year began, my roommate, A.L. (who had flown to visit me for the last week of summer), and I decided to take the train back to school...maybe that trip was a harbinger of things to come, but if it was, I didn't notice. We boarded the train on August 16, hoping to arrive in Newton, KS. on August 19. That didn't happen. After our first train got delayed in Northern CA. by 8 hours, we missed all of our connecting trains on day 2. For some reason, all the station employees decided that we had purposely missed our connections and were very reluctant to help. That being said, when we reached the Bakersfield station, we found that we were going to have to be bussed into Los Angeles due to railroad construction (this was after multiple mix-ups and people telling us to get on the wrong train/bus/ etc.) We just barely made our bus. It was max-out capacity and the air conditioning didn't work. It seems like it was something like a 2-3 hour bus ride to the LA in 90 degree heat, but because the air conditioning wasn't working, our bus met up with another bus we were told was going to take some of the passengers. Ha. It turned out that the other bus was already just as full as our bus and their air conditioning wasn't working either. Anyway, we finally made it to LA and ended up getting to the station there around midnight. The train we were supposed to have been on had left hours and hours earlier, and the next one wasn't to leave until 7 pm the next evening. As we had been on 4 trains and 2 buses that day, and had been blatantly lied to, given wrong directions, and had almost been stranded several times, we were exhausted and ready to pull someone's hair out. When the 4 of us (the other women were a middle-aged mom relocating to a new job, and a grandmother on her way to visit grand kids) who were supposed to have been on the earlier train found a station manager and told him what was going on, he became defensive and basically told us that we had missed the train on purpose-it was our fault and he wanted nothing to do with any of it-wrong thing to say. A.L. and I had had it, and I remember her saying something like, "Listen up buddy...". When he wouldn't listen to her, I stepped in and remember telling him quite sternly that we had paid over $500.00 for tickets and certainly expected better service than to be run from station to station by men like him who claimed we were lying after our trains had been delayed by construction projects, disorganized scheduling, and uninformed station employees. I told him that I was calling in a complaint to the railroad headquarters as soon as I got where I was going (which I did) and I would not hesitate to mention him by name if he wouldn't do something about finding us a place to sleep that night. With nothing else to do, he angrily told someone to put us in a hotel for the night and we could take a taxi back to the station the next day. The rest of our trip was uneventful, but our 3-day trip had turned into 5 by the time we got to KS.
(PS-I don't blame Amtrak for the fiasco...I've heard that construction projects in CA. routinely delay both passenger and commercial trains through that stretch of railroad. I have also had very good experiences with taking Amtrak's Empire Builder between Chicago and the Northwest-and I would do so again if necessary. This particular experience could have been altogether different if station employees had had any clue what they were talking about, or cared to take some time and do what they could to remedy the situation. The Amtrak customer service reps. were very prompt about responding to the complaint I placed later, and a portion of our trip was refunded.)
-pic.: Train station at Redding, CA. on the day that everything went wrong. This picture was taken around 10 am, and before things really got bad. At this point, we knew our first train had been delayed, but weren't sure how that was going to affect the rest of the trip. I didn't know it at the time, but one of the ladies we ended up with during the fiasco is in this photo (gray long-sleeved shirt with luggage), she was a life-saver, and we ended up having dinner with her in the LA station, and all sat near one another on our last connecting train out of the city-she made sure we all compared directions and were in the right place throughout the ordeal. I still remember her first name and wish I had been able to send her a "thank you" after everything was over.
-pic.: A.L. and I at the hotel the railroad put us up in. It was nice to get a shower and be able to relax outside of the busy station. We took the opportunity to walk around the block near our hotel before check out and ended up seeing the LA County Courthouse, the Disney Opera House, and Pershing Square.
After arriving at our new school, A.L. and I tried to adjust to our new surroundings and majors. At this point, she decided to become an English education major, while I was studied Communications until the end of that year. I eventually changed my major to English Ed. last few weeks of that year because I realized that I had felt pushed in that direction for a while, but had been reluctant to accept the idea of being a teacher.
Some of the highlights of Sophomore year included a Fall break trip to Illinois and Indiana (30 hours in the car on a 4 day weekend), visiting a friend in Texas for Thanksgiving (the first Thanksgiving I spent in Tx....and my first experience with homemade southern-style Banana Pudding-best desert around!), Spring break trip to Michigan w A.L.'s grandparents, and a surprise birthday party that A.L. and about 15 friends threw for me after we returned from a quick trip to Springfield, Missouri.
-pic: Driving through St. Louis on the way to Chicago, I told A.L. that I hoped that one day we'd be able to see the Gateway Arch. Not 5 minutes later, we saw it looming over the horizon, and because we'd made a wrong turn on the interstate, ended up driving right past...the pic. turned out well for holding my camera out the window blindly and snapping a quick shot at 60 mph. I guess everything happens for a reason-even wrong turns. :)
-pic.: A.L., our friend M.M., and I in a courtyard off Michigan Ave. in Chicago.
-pic: A.L. bought a kitten for her brother and his fiance as a wedding present, and we had to drive him 3 hours to their house. He was a fiesty little thing (which is what made him so endearing in the first place), so we thought he'd be a handful in the car. However, as soon as we got out of town, he curled up in A.L.'s lap and went right to sleep with his paw on the steering wheel. In this picture he had managed to get up on her family's kitchen table and had crawled into a card.
During the second half of the year, I began communicating over e-mail with the guy who would become my first boyfriend. I also changed my major. As the school year came to a close, a friend and I ended up in an argument that was unable to be resolved and our friendship was lost. I was also diagnosed with depression and was placed on medication to treat it. It was tough end to the year and a difficult summer...probably my most trying year of college.
-pic.: Younger bro. and I in May, after completing my sophomore year.
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