Traveling

I may be taking a short break from blogging because tomorrow I leave for a short vacation.  Each is an actually a Christmas trip.  I am going to my old hometown to see one of my friends who will also be visiting my old hometown.  I'm so excited because haven't seen him since  the 80s! I wasn't able to have a visit with another one of my best friends who I try to see when I am there.
So I'll be somewhere with no Dragon NaturallySpeaking on the computer!  I will try to blog little bit just to keep you caught on what's happening.
Traveling is a good topic for the day because it is a much bigger issue for me than it is for other people.  Even with the help I received at the airport, it doesn't account for things like standing in lines or getting bags in and out of places , and other stuff like that.  This time, I am taking the train.  In so many ways the train is much more convenient, but in some ways, more of a challenge.  Amtrak is working very hard to accommodate people like me.  The problem is, there is no skycap or someone else to help me get into the station itself.  Parking in downtown Chicago is always difficult and even handicapped parking and does not really get you very much closer to the station itself.  So my husband usually drops me off.  The easiest place to get dropped off happens to be an entrance was no elevator to the main level.  Just an escalator, which I passionately hate.  Escalators freak me out.  Getting on an up escalator is freaky enough, but standing at the top of a down escalator is a whole other level of freaked out.  The last time I tried at Union Station, I attempted to put my bag on first and  step on after it without killing myself.  The problem is that I need something stable to hold onto in order to feel as if I am not going  to fall down.  Did you know that the rails on the escalator and never stop moving?  So when I put my bag on, it moved on ahead way before me and then decided to topple itself down the stairs the rest of the way.  Fortunately, there was no one on the escalator so it didn't knock anybody down.  I made it down  without falling, but it was a little mortifying.  Now we have figured out that we can actually get a train in Glenview which is much closer with way easier parking.  It leaves really early in the morning and then I have to transfer trains at Union Station. Fortunately once I am in the station itself, there will be people who can help me.  I can hoist myself up onto the train, but I can't hoist my bags up onto a train.  I usually pay a little bit extra to go first class-the difference is really minimal-and the seats are bigger and I get to go onto the train first.
The last time I took the train into Missouri, there was a service disruption on the train.  They are building a high-speed train from Chicago to St. Louis!  When it is done, it will only take an hour to get to St. Louis on the train!  I think it's supposed to be done in 2014.  However when they were working on it last summer I had to take a super bus!  That was an adventure... there is no first class on the bus obviously, so the seating was uncomfortable at best.  The super bus is a chartered bus, but really it is one step down from a regular chartered bus.  It's a way for students to cheaply go back and forth from St. Louis to Chicago.  So there weren't a lot of people who weren't students on this bus.  I can no longer kid myself that I could possibly pass for a student...  The bus also takes a lot longer than a train and the scenery is not pleasant.  Even though Illinois is incredibly flat and boring, riding through on a train is much more enjoyable than driving on a bus on the highway!
Transferring on and off of the bus was a whole lot more difficult than transferring trains as well!  Someone threw my bag onto the wrong bus.  Everyone else was grabbing their bags off of the bus and putting on a new bus.  No one noticed me or helped me at all.  I finally stood and screamed, "I need help!"  I guess that's the best way to get assistance!
So hopefully this trip will be a little more uneventful and uncomfortable. 
The train station in St. Louis used to be called Amshack instead of Amtrak.  For a major metropolitan city, it was pretty disgraceful and nonexistent!  It had no real facilities or even a real building.  Now it is a much nicer building with a tiny food court and an actual bathrooms.  Their service for people like me is not fabulous, but if I stand and scream, "I need help!"  It's usually pretty effective!
So wish me a safe trip and I'm so excited to see two of my old and dear friends.  Oh yeah and my parents...
Talk to you soon and wish me luck on my trip!