Photos

I'm kind of walking through my vacation pictures in a random fashion here - just picking ones that appeal to me at the moment, and as I get them ready for display. Our Canadian Rockies trip last year started out with an Amtrak train ride to Chicago, where we caught the Amtrak Empire Builder train across the northern states, deep into Montana. We rented a car in Shelby and drove into Alberta and returned almost 3 weeks later.

This photo is from either very northern Illinois or just after we crossed the border into Wisconsin. There was not much to shoot out the windows on this leg of the trip, so I shot inside the train. This is the Observation Car - the whole train was a double decker sort of thing, this part is on the top, below is a snack bar with big, wide windows, too. The windows in this part were very large and gave a fairly panoramic view. Amtrak also had a couple of folks from the National Park Service that told us about all the points of interest along the way. They stayed with us all the way to Winona, Wisconsin. They said that sometimes in the summer they have volunteers to ride the entire way to Portland, Oregon. They were interesting and informative, but eventually some of the younger folks started to imbibe heavily in the fermented beverages available and it started to get too noisy to hear the Park Service guys speak, so we retired to a sleeper car.

This was a relaxing and fun way to start our vacation. It took us about a day and a half to get to Shelby, Montana from St. Louis, and then another few hours to drive to Calgary, but it was very worthwhile. We made about 7000 total miles with driving around Alberta and getting there and back, so it would have been very taxing to do as much as we did if we drove both ways. Amtrak also lets you take more stuff than an airplane - I max out my luggage just in electronics and camera gear - at least that's what my wife says! I actually got all my required tech gear into one backpack - a KATA 203.

If you have time and opportunity, I highly recommend Amtrak for a great way to vacation!

Have a super day - I'm heading to Florida tomorrow so I may not have time to post anything.