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Good Morning, America, How Are You?
My Amtrak Journey Home from Farm Aid Yielded Some Scenic Views
When I learned earlier this year that the annual Farm Aid Festival would be held September 26 in Virginia Beach, Virginia, I decided to make it an Amtrak adventure. I always go for a window seat, because it is a loooong trip, I love scenery and I have serious problems sleeping on moving vehicles, so at least I can stare out the window.
Most of the trip occurred overnight, but there was enough daylight to produce some interesting glimpses of your land and my land. We are living in a perilous time, but hopefully, if the people can still decide to work together, we can get it back on the right track.
This building is one of the first you see when you leave Washington, D.C.'s Union Station. Now a rehabbed mixed use building, it has a major place in modern music history. Do you know what it is? (Answer down below...)
This one is a little nostalgia trip for me. Rockville, Maryland is a suburb of D.C., the seat of populous Montgomery County. Some readers surely know that I worked in D.C. for 30 years (1981-2011) as a political journalist, and from 1987 to 1997 we lived in Gaithersburg just north of Rockville and spent a lot of time in Rockville.
A Fresh Fields store there (which later became one of the area's earliest Whole Foods markets) was my first encounter with Natural Channel grocery. My father was living in a senior apartment house there when he passed away in 2008.
Like most people, I prefer to take pictures on bright, sunny days, but a rainy Sunday added a bit of mystery to these shots of the beautiful upper Potomac River at historic Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (site of John Brown's Raid pre-Civil War).
As I mentioned, I spent a lot of time just staring out the window. Somewhere in Ohio, I looked up and saw this beautiful, almost full moon.
If you ever have the urge to see a Cleveland Browns football game, do note that their Huntington Bank Field is directly next to the Cleveland Amtrak station.
Dawn came over farm country in northern Indiana (also in the top photo).
As we neared Chicago, we traveled past the smokestacks of the steel mills and other heavy industry in northwest Indiana.
I also got my first homecoming glimpse of Lake Michigan.
My hometown's amazing skyline and the Dan Ryan Expressway.
And finally, a couple of pictures from my bus ride home to Lakeview.
BTW, that Washington, D.C. building at the top is the former Washington Coliseum — site of The Beatles' first U.S. concert in February 1964! Small and outdated as an arena, the Coliseum fell into decay with incarnations as a parking garage and a waste recovery facility, and at times looked doomed to a teardown. I hadn't been by the site for many years and was happy to see it restored with a new life.
I don't travel much anymore, and when I do, appreciate seeing new places and enjoying their local hospitality.
But damn, I love Chicago.
At Farm Aid, I again got to hear Willie Nelson singing On the Road Again and how the life he loves is making music with his friends. For me, the life I love is being back home with Barb and friends.
Or as Dorothy Gale, the creation of Chicago author L. Frank Baum, says in The Wizard of Oz, there's no place like home.
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