MONDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2008

Today we got up at around 7 again, asking ourselves what we should do until 12am when we had to check out of our hotel.

We decided to walk over to Borders on State Street to buy a set of chess and a few books for our train ride to Arizona. We did so, but had to stop at Dunkin Donuts to have breakfast and to warm up again, because the temperatures were still too low to stay outside for more than fifteen minutes in a row.

At around 11 o’clock we returned to our hotel, played a last game of pool, took our luggage and checked out. Bus #126 took us directly to Union Station where our train was supposed to depart at 3:15pm. Amazingly Amtrak’s ticket printer remembered my reservation from October and we were issued our tickets to Phoenix. Later we even found out that we could check our luggage so that we did not have to carry it around with us all the time. That made it even easier to use the remaining two hours for a last high quality lunch before boarding the train and living on water and donuts for more than a day. We found a packed place two blocks away from Union Station that had the best Chili I’ve ever eaten. Strengthened like that we bought a gallon of water each and a dozen mixed donuts and boarded our train.

The train ride started with a breakdown of our engine: Just at the city limit of Chicago we stopped and were standing in the middle of a freeway crossover for at least ten minutes. In the end a voice on the speaker told us that there were problems with the engine and that they tried to reset it to get it working again. Another five minutes later we were back on our way. Still, an uneasy feeling remained, because after all this train was about to take us through half of the US.
For the next three hours or so Bernhard and I spent some time playing chess and then watched a movie before we drifted off into the land of dreams quite early.