Well, no. It’s later than that now. But most Saturday mornings I’m not out of the house at 8 AM, let alone any time earlier than that.
This morning was different because I dropped Girl off to take the SAT Subject test in Biology, and she needed to be there before 7:45 AM (prop up eyelid.) So, I got to be downtown (such as it is) at 8 AM.
And after walking her to the line to go in (she DIDN’T want me to wait with her), I then went and picked up Square Donuts for Hubby and Boy, stopped at the hardware store for some supplies to fix a couple of things before my inlaws visit in a couple of weeks, and visited the opening day at the Farmers Market.
The Farmers Market that I have never made it to before. I’ve wanted to check it out, but Saturdays are my lazy mornings and so I never seem to get out of the house in time to make it. It was about what I expected (esp. for this time of year), but I got to visit with a few friends and picked up this delish looking chocolate ganach cake from a local bakery (one of the friends I saw). I even saw another friend (ex-homeschooler, her youngest is older than Boy) that I haven’t seen since we were in New Mexico. We cross paths constantly and have many common friends (who aren’t homeschoolers), but hadn’t run into each other in the last 4 years.
In my running around, I also got trained.
For anyone looking at the word and scratching their head, that’s short hand for “got stopped by a train crossing the road.”
Indiana and Illinois have the highest percent of on-grade road crossings per mile of track of anywhere in the US. Terre Haute is even worst because we have a switch yard that is actually inside the city limits. If you are driving from one side of town to the other, you’ll have to cross numerous tracks (especially when you go east/west) and getting stopped by a train is common.
In fact it’s an acceptable excuse for being late to almost any activity. There’s some law in Indiana that fines the train companies if they block the roads for more than ~ 7 mins. at any one time and the companies actually budget 100’s of 1000’s of dollars to pay them. Crazy, but part of life here.
Needless to say, I’ve spent a lot of time staring at freight cars as I’ve waited. But this train had something a little different.
It’s not unusual to see the boxes from 18 wheelers piled on flat bed cars go by, but they are usually generic boxes or obviously owned by the train company and used only to make handling freight easier.
This time the boxes were from trucking companies (Xtra, J.B. Hunt, and UPS to name a few) that must have decided that the trains were cheaper than using tracker trailers. Some of them even still had their trailers (the wheels and stuff) still attached and had just been loaded that way.
Made me wonder if the current high gas prices (around here they’ve jumped nearly a dollar this week) are causing the change, or if the train companies are slashing what they charge in order to keep their stock rolling.
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We get trained here all the time, too. Probably because the train tracks run basically from Goshen to Elkhart (north to south) and have branches off that run east to west (we live between these 2 towns) and because we also have a train yard in Elkhart. Lots of trains sit blocking the tracks for long periods of time either coming in or going out – that 7 minutes is laughable.
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It was nice to see you this morning, Meg! And thanks for shout-out to my blog.
As for trains:
1. I usually refer to it as being railroaded.
2. While waiting for trains to pass I have:
a. knitted
b. practiced Tai Chi ‘waving hands in clouds’
c. pulled out my camera & photographed interesting graffiti
d. read
e. made a phone call or played a game on my iTouch
3. Someone told me the average wait time for trains to pass is way shorter than we think it is (2 or 3 minutes) – of course that doesn’t help much when the darn thing slows to a crawl a n d t h e n stops. -
lol – I usually play solitare on my pda or call someone.
I like the camera idea.
And I have timed the fool things, though I’m sure you’re right. It feels subjectively a lot longer than it may actually be.
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Well, most people don’t enjoy getting trained or railroaded, but to me it’s security.
We took another free ride on the UP safety train this week. The instructor told us that UP has 8,000 engines and 20,000 boxcars sitting idle. The car industry has made a huge dent in their operations. So any sign of train life is good to me, because while he doens’t work for a railroad, my husband works for the train industry. Trickles–if the trains aren’t moving, my hubby doesn’t have a lot of work, etc. Last week my hubby’s company laid of 20 more employees. What scary times.
Like Zann mentioned, I always enjoy looking at the graffiti. There are actually some amazing artists–boggles my mind what they do with a can of spraypaint! lol
When Dad took us to Indiana a few years back, I was floored that one town we visited actually had train tracks in the middle of one of the streets. I had never seen that before. Drive next to a train–how weird. I can’t remember which town that was.
It’s amazing how big of dent the car industry has on others. I always think of Dad when I get stuck at a crossing.
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