Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th June

Sunday 28th
We spent all of today travelling - we arrived in Washington DC around 1pm then had to wait until 5pm for our onward connection to Williamsburg. And …. guess what - the train was an hour late and we didn’t leave until 6pm. By that time we were pretty exhausted. We arrived in Williamsburg around 9.45pm and settled into our hotel for a welcome good night’s sleep at around 10pm.

Saturday 27th
We woke up this morning with the prospect of packing yet again as, sadly, we had to leave Chicago today. We checked out of the hotel at 10.45 but were able to leave our luggage there as our train was not due to leave until 7pm. We spent the morning exploring part of the shopping district on foot and to see where the ‘El’ runs over the top of the Wabash Street - scene of many filmed car chases.

We then went to the Millennium Park. We thought it a good idea to avoid the central part of Grant Park as much as possible as the ‘Taste of Chicago’ started today. This is called ‘the biggest picnic in the world’ and hundreds of Chicago eating places have stalls there for the general public to try samples of their fare. There seemed to be lots of entertainment going on together with a funfair and the whole area was heaving with people. The Millennium Park was pretty crowded too. There were some very large modern sculptures there including ‘the bean’, a shiny kidney bean shaped sculpture:

(if you look carefully around the middle of the pic, you can see me (wearing a light coloured shirt) taking the photo)

which gives a totally different reflected view of the famous skyline, and a water feature consisting of two large rectangular waterfalls which create a big ‘puddle’ for people to cool off in. One of the rectangles had a changing face on it:

Very clever.

By then we both had had enough of ‘wandering’ so we headed slowly back to the hotel where we sat reading and people watching until we got a cab at 5.30 for Union Station.

We went to the station around 5.30pm. As we had a sleeping ‘roomette’ booked on the train we were able to go to the first class lounge and wait for boarding. When we did Terry commented ‘we have more ‘ette’ than ‘room’’ as it is very small, 3ft 6in x 6ft 6in, We had two seats which converted to bunk beds for sleeping. As I had the 'casting vote' I opted for the bottom bunk - Terry had a bit of a problem climbing into the top one! All meals were included in our ticket so we had a very nice dinner in the dining car and breakfast on Sunday morning. Sleeping, for me, was again not very successful on the train but Terry zonked out for he whole night. The train was very bumpy and noisy as the whistle/hooter (or whatever it is called) is sounded very frequently. But having a private room with a bed was a huge improvement to sleeping in coach class even though there was lots personal space there and the chairs recline.