Trains

Trains....I'm riding one right now, back to Shinji from Tokyo after spending the weekend in Texas to catch me a little wedding. I've always loved trains. As kids, Josh, Kate and I had 2-3 little train sets that we would play with. I think one was a hand-me-down from my uncle Greg. It mostly got set up around Christmas time because of the limited amount of track available for it. The fun thing about that train in particular was it had a red button on the control box that if pressed, while the train was running, would result in a little plume of smoke billowing from the engine. It smelt like burning and very well could have been, but it was also way cool.

The thought that spawned this particular entry was when I was trying to remember my first train ride. For a while I was sure it was when I was studying in Spain. After writing that first little paragraph I began to recall a picture. Somewhere in my folks archives I believe there is a photo of Grandpa holding me while I slept. His legs are propped up on the seat in front of him and he's either looking out over the New Mexico landscape, it was a tourist train just outside of Albuquerque, or sleeping himself. I was still just a baby at the time so that pretty much killed the first time in a train in Spain idea.

But then I got to thinking about the first train in Spain (and the main pain was rain) and I'm concluding it was my second ride. And it was awesome. About after being in Spain a month, myself and 3 friends decided to go to a film festival in the far north of Spain in a small bay town called San Sebastian. We had a long weekend and left on a Thursday afternoon. The first leg of that trip was on Spain's bullet train called the AVE from Seville to Madrid. Not only is the countryside beautiful along that route but your going so fast you cant help but feel like your flying about a foot off the ground the whole way. Once in Madrid, we hopped on an overnighter that took us all the way to San Sebastian. We were all really excited and spent most of the evening talking to 3 guys who I believe were Belgian. My other 3 friends were all girls, so to impress them the Belgians kept on giving me shit because I was from Texas. Never mind the fact we all went to TTU.

That night I got NO sleep. The cabin I shared with my friend haley was another classic example of how the most of the world seems to be designed for everyone under the height of six feet. I'm 6'3", my bed could have been no longer than 5'6". It was funny at first. Haley and I joked about how I could stick my feet out of the window for leg space, but I wound up just tucking my knees and snoozing from there. Well, the window did stay open that night, only because it was so hot (mid-september). Throughout the night just as I would fall asleep, again, and over again a train running in the opposite direction would pass us by on the parallel track. The sound of this happening was loud enough to wake the dead, window being up or down. But what really woke me, triggered by this cacophonous noise, was the dream I kept on having that my feet, which were just long enough to be caught by an oh so close passing train, were being whacked off because they slipped through the window as i slept and were just long enough to be caught by the oh so close passing train.

Haley found this hysterical, I just wound up sweating the rest of the night.

My current overnighter is pretty cool. I bought the cheap ticket and am now lying in a bunk, which is once again too short, but this time I'm sharing it with my three bags of stuff. You could call it cozy.




The wedding was great and one for the record books. Here's a picture of mandi and josh.

The other above is of my dad and I. He, mom and myself took a train to DC when they visited me last year in Richmond, it was a fun day. Its also the only pic of a train I have