Tag Archives: Amtrak

Tools To Build A Dream: King’s speech

Posted on by John

Let the current lift your heart and send it soaring
Write the timeless message clear across the sky
So that all of us can read it and remember when we need it
That a dream conceived in truth can never die

Black Butterfly, by Deniece Williams (YouTube)

Man, I loved that song the first time I heard it. Reminds me of my recently written about first trip to the beach, as that’s the first time I remember hearing it. I’m sure I had before, as my sisters had and wore out a Deniece Williams cassette, (you know those blocky things with spools of tape that you had to flip sides in order to continue hearing?) But I think we had little else to listen to on the radio during that trip, and so that cassette was played several more times. The song was then indelibly etched into my memory. Anyway, you’ll see its relevance to this entry in a bit.

The Second Leg (Cont)

The train rattled first westward, into the small town of Belmont in Gaston County, then made stops in Gastonia and Kings Mountain NC, Greenville, Spartanburg and Clemson SC, and a town called Taquoa or some such then Gainesville Ga before arriving. There may have been more, but if so I missed those in what little sleep I managed. I found that if I turned my body just so and pressed my head against the seat, I could drift off for minutes at a time. I’d set my timer for two hours, because I didn’t want to take a chance on missing Atlanta if one could remain onboard past that point. I don’t think we could have anyway, but better safe than sorry.

As we approached, the cabin stirred and began coming to life. Someone wouldn’t or couldn’t stop coughing. A baby cried. The woman next to me told me a little of her story, particularly that she would be babysitting a tribe of grandchildren, including a rambunctious 4-year-old whom she had little hope of keeping up with. I didn’t ask that woman’s name, just enjoyed the conversation.

On disembarkation, it took staff so long to come and assist us that that woman decided to walk me in herself. We took an elevator up a level, popped out, and my sister was already there waiting.

A Place With Space

Ever been somewhere that just makes you feel like the Chinese ideals of feng shui probably intend? Just a certain openness, where the walls are curved and thus the energy seems to flow effortlessly throughout. That’s the feeling I got when I walked into my sister and her partner’s apartment. Or maybe it had to do with being tired and slightly loopy after such a long and bumpy ride, but whatever. They currently reside about 20 minutes outside of Atlanta proper, in a town called Duluth. Man, I don’t think any other US city has as many parts to it as Atlanta does.

Anyhow, I discovered that my eldest sister’s twin, along with her partner, were also there. Party time! Dogs came to say hi, as I sat on their comfortable sectional and tried to keep my head from bouncing up and down too many times. It was about 9 AM, but after a delicious breakfast of bacon, eggs, and grits, I finally gave over to an hour or so of sleep on stationary ground. It felt great.

We passed time catching some of the early football games, especially watching Georgia Tech, the local public university, smack Waford, a private school in South Carolina, around. Then we wanted to find a little something to get into.

Off to See King

Pic of my sisters and I standing near the MLK fountain

We decided to visit the Martin Luther King Center, to which I had been before but always seem to learn something new when I come. The most interesting part was going down into the fellowship hall at the old Ebenezer Baptist Church, where we listened to an individual first give a bit of a history lesson. I can’t recall all of what he said, but others in King’s family had also been assassinated after his death. Those were sad and turbulent times, and I’d recommend taking a look at the King Center site as well as a supposedly pretty good Wikipedia article on his life. I plan to once I finish writing this, as there is no doubt much that I don’t know. And from what I’ve been told, school kids nowadays are learning even less than we did.

“The number one question I get” that guy said “is are services still held in this building. The answer is no.” That church has been designated as a historical landmark, and services now take place in a newer facility across the street.

The speaker concludes with a near spot-on impersonation of Dr. King’s I Have A Dream speech, even capturing the right inflections and King’s tendency to almost ram sentences into each other. I hadn’t realized that we had permission to record it, or I may have. The only thing that would’ve ade it more real is audience interaction, but still it was pretty powerful to hear those words spoken where King himself had delivered countless other speeches.

Saturday Wind-down

The rest of the day was the kind of relaxation I’d come for: first in a spacious townhome on comfortable leather couches that we left as my sister said “let’s get out of here before you go to sleep!”

Back at their place, someone cooked up some delicious nachos with meat, sauce and the works, and I got my fingers all sticky. I loved every bite, though. Then we sat on the deck with a couple of beers and talked about life while enjoying the sweltering night.

And that pretty much made up Saturday. Finally inside to bed, sliding under sheets and, after listening to the Florida State Seminoles just manage to stave off an upset bid by the Oklahoma State University Cowboys, diving headlong into the first real, sweet sleep I’d really had all week.

Tools To Build A Dream: The sleeper

Posted on by John

He kept dreamin’
(Dreamin’)
Ooh, that someday, he’d be a star
(A superstar but he didn’t get far)
But he sure found out the hard way
That dreams don’t always come true, oh no

Read more: Gladys Knight And The Pips – Midnight Train To Georgia Lyrics | MetroLyrics

Midnight Train To Georgia, by Gladys Knight and the Pips (YouTube)

Oddly, I’ve had this song bouncing around in my head ever since I began planning my Atlanta trip to visit one of my sisters. It probably has more to do with the Amtrak that departs from Greensboro, North Carolina at 12:22 AM for Atlanta. This makes up the second leg of travel if one wishes to reach the city of peaches? peach tree city? haha I don’t know Atlanta’s knickname but imagine it’s something to do with peaches right?, from Durham.

First The Backstory

Because every character must have a backstory, and my family is full of characters.

Many of us see social media’s dark side: its tendency to isolate us and make a person more likely to hold a conversation with someone 2,000 miles away than one sitting right across the table from him. Board any bus or train these days, and you’ll note that there is an element of truth to this assumption.

However, there are some silver linings. For instance, I think that Facebook has made our somewhat scattered family more aware of what is going on with each of its members than we have been in many years. Most of us don’t really have easy access to constant transportation, or else priorities like kids, jobs, etc mean that we must stay relatively close to home. The online space allows us to celebrate achievements, pick each other up, and otherwise respond on a near daily basis, bringing some real closeness back.

So, my eldest sister responded to one of my recent Facebook posts by saying that she would really like it if I made the journey down to Atlanta someday. I thought about it, and decided why not sooner rather than later. I go to see my cousin most holidays, and while I will always enjoy hanging out with him and would do so whenever possible, a little variety is, as they say, the spice of life. Daring to do something different creates unexpected opportunity, as I most certainly discovered throughout this vacation. I left Friday and returned yesterday.

The First Leg

As the Friday workday drew to a close, I was already feeling concerned due to a wave of tiredness brought on by Sunday night’s lack of sleep. How does that make any sense, you ask? Well, I never really get the chance to fully catch up if that initial workday is offkilter, at least not till the next weekend. I figured what the hey though, after that long overnight train ride I would be way out of sorts anyway.

The cab deposited me at Durham Amtrak Station, and after stepping inside of its frigid confines to retrieve my boarding pass, I insisted on waiting in the mugginess that threatened rain.

“I’m not built for cold!” I told the woman behind the counter as she slid the ticket into my hand. Maybe it’s a sign of how many times I’ve passed through that station that she was saying “Hi, Mr. Miller” before I even got all the way to the counter. And her voice didn’t even sound like one of the people I know for sure.

The train is supposed to leave at 5:24, but that big thing is almost never on time. Yet for a holiday weekend it did remarkably well, rolling in at 5:39. A passenger ran up to assist me, because she hadn’t seen that one of the other women who works in there, my favorite, was making her way out. As I made my way down the aisle, a pair of hands popped out to suck me into a row and I settled in.

“Hi,” I said, because I must always attempt to greet the person sitting next to me. I allow them to decide if they wish to converse further.

Immediately, this person was interested. It seems that she rather suddenly lost a significant amount of sight, especially her central vision. I don’t know much about how sight works, but apparently this makes it hard for her to identify faces, view things that are either too close or too far away, and results in a classification of legal blindness. Understandably, she has found the adjustment challenging. I talked about how I can empathize due to the fact that I have lost so much hearing over the years and have to keep re-thinking how I handle social situations. Unintended feelings in others of having been snubbed by simply not knowing that our attention was being requested was definitely a common issue.

I’m never sure to what degree I am helpful in such situations, but this is a big reason why I am always open to talking to people about my blindness, heck we may as well say deafblindness at least if not wearing hearing aids, and how I cope. I’m just hoping that she can use technology that she already has, like the iPhone, to at least mitigate some of the changes. I will continue to do what I can.

The train arrived in Greensboro pretty much on time, after another minor delay while we awaited the passing of the Raleigh-bound train. I was interested, because I would finally get to enter their vaunted station.

On entering, I met a nice individual who made sure I had everything I needed from arrival till departure. We got to their little coffee shop just as it was closing, and I snagged a Mountain Dew. Then, she dug up menus from somewhere and I placed an order with a place called, I think, Big City Burgers for, you guessed it, a burger and fries. It seems that any restaurants in that general vicinity will deliver to the station, which is pretty cool. Given that I had six hours to wait, I had contemplated taking a cab somewhere. I guess this saved me some dough, though.

I didn’t do much else, except wolf down that sandwich, listen to some of the college football game between Syracuse and Vilanova, and read a little. The wait didn’t seem that bad, so long as my wonderful entertainment device was charged and functioning. And speaking of, if you have a smart phone or tablet and don’t have an external battery, I recommend getting this one from Amazon. It has changed my life. Well ok that’s probably an exaggeration, but you get my point.

The Second Leg<

Because the train left from Greensboro’s station, it departed right on time. This time, I was seated beside an older woman who wrapped up in her blanket and dropped off pretty quickly.

In fact, the whole cabin felt almost otherworldly, with the whistle sound drifting in as if on a fog. This may have had more to do with the mode in which I had my hearing aids set. I’d wanted to see the lounge on this train, if that were even possible, but figured it would be hard to summon someone with everything so quiet. No stations were called either, and after a 45 minute stop in Charlotte, we largely just kept on rolling.

Continued in next entry, as it stretched on into Saturday like my flight to Madrid nearly 10 years ago. Stay tuned!

Booking it! Online?

Posted on by John

I would venture to say that at some point or other, every blind and visually impaired computer user has experienced this difficulty. I’d say that it results from the varying combination of browsers and assistive technology we might use to interact with the sites, as well as the many ways a site can be designed and function when certain actions are taken.

I’m headed to Charlotte to visit my cousin this weekend, yay! We’re gonna watch the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four matchups this Saturday and probably talk a lot about any and everything.

In getting there, I’m taking the Amtrak as usual. I decided I would go ahead and finally create an account there for myself, so that I might get some Guest Rewards points since I’m likely to make at least this trip fairly often in the coming year.

I log on, and after a little of this and that, manage to enter my user information. A number is then generated for me, but I hadn’t known at the time that this wasn’t the end of the acquisition process for guest rewards membership. I sure wish I had realized it!

Next, I proceeded to attempt purchasing my roundtrip ticket between Durham and Charlotte. I like that I could add the two stations as favorites, which in theory would make future scheduling a snap. Once I managed to find the link labeled Passengers with Disabilities, which I needed in order to request assistance and get the small discount for which blind folks qualify, I made the, apparent, mistake of linking my Guest Rewards account to the trip I was attempting to book.

So here’s where I really became frustrated. I got my card info in, clicked the Purchase button, and it just sat there saying it was “Processing payment”. Paranoid about the idea that if I clicked it again I’d be charged twice, I allowed the machine to sit there for about 20 minutes before conceding and calling it a night, for it was already late.

Fortunately everything had been saved, so I relaunched the same search the next day and got the same hanging Now Processing result. I was wishing for at least an error of some kind, so that I’d know that something was wrong and perhaps what that something was.

I opted to give it a try with the iPhone app, but with that I couldn’t even get the date to enter correctly. So, I threw up my proverbial hands and called in to order the ticket as I had done on all previous occasions. I told the call center representative with whom I spoke I was doing that, throwing up my hands, and she laughed. She was nice though, and demonstrated to me that the problem was that I had not completed my enrollment in that Guest Rewards program.

I could go off on a tangent regarding my usefulness of loyalty programs, which often require you to have amassed piles of points to redeem one flight/trainride/pizza/what have you. I of course understand this logic, as the hope is that one will continue spending with said company in order to obtain the benefits, and that so doing will result in greater profit for the company. But I usually don’t see the need, and just buy the thing I want outright. I know there are some things to be gained from these associations though, which is why I was going to give it a go. Do you engage in any loyalty programs?

I do think I might sign up for Southwest Airlines’ Rapid Rewards, as I’m slowly starting to use them more. They actually have done a good job lately of making their site a lot more accessible with a screen-reader, ad they offer great prices on nonstop flights from my local airport.

So that was a little of my trip booking fun. I guess for now I won’t actually become a Guest Rewards member, but I might feel like signing up eventually. I do have to say that the Amtrak site was usable for the most part, but just wish it could have been a bit more explanatory and that things could be more easily located.

Especially for those with visual disabilities, what have been some of your trip booking challenges and/or successes lately. I’ve also heard that Expedia isn’t exactly wrking well for screen-reader users lately either, but cannot personally attest to this as it’s been a while since I’ve completed a booking there. Weigh in.