Shrines of the Saint Lawrence

Part One: The Iron Horse

I left Denver on the evening of July 23rd on the first stage of my journey. I boarded the California Zephyr at the Denver Union Station. This was very exciting for me as it was my first long train journey. Riding the Amtrak train is very fun but the seats do not make comfortable beds. The old man sitting next to me told me that he had been drafted when he was a young man. He had ridden the train then and had not been on a train since! He was riding the train again as an old man to see what had changed. The original California Zephyr, which he knew as a young man, is now in a railroad museum!

On the 24th, the Zephyr arrived in Chicago and I had a six-hour wait in Chicago Union Station Great Hall. It is a very impressive building. Finally, in the late evening, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited bound for Albany, New York.

During the morning and early afternoon of the 25th, we passed through beautiful New York State. In the afternoon, we arrived in Albany. I boarded a Vermont Transline bus to Burlington Vermont after a lengthy wait. The Albany station has lots of infrastructure for the train passengers but just a bare dingy room for the bus passengers. For the first couple hours on this bus, I had beautiful sunset views of New York and Vermont but eventually, it got dark and my two previous bad nights caught up with me and I fell asleep.

I woke up with a jump around midnight just as the bus was pulling into a station. I looked out the window and saw a sign for Burlington. I hustled off the bus only to find that I had disembarked a station early and was at the Burlington Airport not the downtown transit center. In my half-awake state, I came to two wrong conclusions. First, that I had less than an hour until I had to be at the downtown transit center. And second, that I was very far away from my correct stop. In reality, I had about 4 hours until the bus would arrive and it is only a three-and-a-half-mile walk to the downtown transit center. In my panic, I got a taxi to the downtown transit center. When I arrived, I found that I still had a dark, cold 4-hour wait in the rain. There were no indoor facilities at this station. Finally, my connecting bus arrived and I was not sorry to leave Burlington.

On the morning of the 26th, I crossed the border into Canada and arrived In Montreal!