Our Bucket List Adventure: Day 1

April 7, 2016

Now that we’re back from our bucket list adventure of riding Amtrak’s California Zephyr train from Chicago to San Francisco and back, it all seems kind of surreal. We did so much in a relatively short amount of time that it’s hard to process it all.

And then there’s the pictures. Oh yeah….

I took about 4,000 pictures and videos over a 13 day span. Most of them were over a 10-day span though, since I took very few pictures in Chicago. Which means I averaged about 400 pictures a day. However, a lot of those are trash. Seriously. When flying in a plane or riding a train, it’s hard to get a good, clear picture.

With a plane, the windows are curved and kind of “cloudy”. Here’s a picture I took en route to Chicago.

pic of landscape

Kind of fuzzy, but a good look at the landscape we were flying over.

Then another I took of Chicago as we started to descend to land at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

pic of chicago

That was really blurred! Besides the speed of plane descending, it was getting dark and it was raining. Not ideal for pictures!

Fortunately, there were much better pictures coming even though the train had problems of it’s own…. trees and electric wires in the way, jolts just when you snapped the shutter…. but if you take enough pictures, you’re bound to end up with a few decent ones. (Gotta love digital cameras and not having to pay to process ALL your pictures to see what you’ve got!)

Our first day was relatively uneventful and short considering we flew out of Huntsville, Alabama in the evening, took a taxi from the airport to our motel, and that was about it. I fear most of what we remember about Chicago is RAIN. And a less than stellar motel (reminder to self: cheap isn’t always a good thing).

The real adventure started on Day 2 when we boarded the California Zephyr, so stay tuned for the next installment!

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