Red Truck Tales: And then there was snow!

So, i'm not sure i have any new pics for this post...so i plan to pull out some old ones! Congrats to Laura, who just got hired to be the full time, long term preschool teacher at the woodstock school! I start on Monday. Pics to come. In the meantime, i planned to go and visit everyone (lily) up north for my last 4 day weekend, possibly ever. Ben got up at 7 am, huge for him, and drove me to the train station. I had a big bag of train snacks, much more than i should have brought, i was feeling silly, but assured myself that i would need snacks on the way south also... There was controversy on the way up, by way of text message, about who would pick me up. I was hearing doomsday things from the island, and no one was super excited about coming to mt vernon. There was talk about a bus from mv to oak harbor, and whether or not it was running was up for guess. When the call came over the train loudspeaker that the snow and tree slide had taken out the track and the train we were on was officially annulled ( they said that!) I pretty much knew that my best option was to go home. A few hours later, buses arrived to take people to seattle to take whatever connections may be available. I made the decision to just stay on the train, which would be reversing it's direction ( two headed train!) after the others got off. It was myself and one other lady making this choice- her name was vas-something long- an exchange student from India who was here taking a quarter of painting classes at psu. She had also been here last year teaching farsi at psu and had gotten a scholarship to come back. Once everyone was gone, we grabbed our bags and headed to the big, comfy seats in business class, where we camped out for the trip home. During this trip, we both had to "get our tickets back" from the assistant conductor in order to get a refund in the Portland station. This was such a simple task- the assistant conductor was sitting at a table in the dining car with a big stack of hard copy tickets that he flipped through to find our names, one by one. I have been baffled before at the strangely old fashioned ways of amtrack, for instance, when you check in you are given a colored slip of paper with a car and seat written on it, by someone's hand (<- someones, someone's?) and you put it in a slot above your seat. Along the ride, the worker comes along and can tell by the color of the slip who is getting off where. This system just seems so archaic, with so much room for error- I would question it, if it were not for the entirely 40+ staff. I tell you what, when the next generation of amtrack workers takes over, that shit is not going to fly.