Tickets please, punch punch punch!

 

Last year in July, Dan and I took a doozy of a trip to Baltimore to pick up my car after we moved here to New York.  Since the Uhaul could only haul one car (Dan's), and I was driving Dan's pickup with his work trailer, we couldn't bring my car.  We ended up leaving it parked in Baltimore and picked it up three weeks later. 

 

The biggest quandary was how to get to Baltimore without driving down, so that we wouldn't have to then drive TWO vehicles back 8 hours.  I opted for the cheapest route we could find.  I ended up doing something foolish (who? ME? ) and bought train tickets from Whitehall to Schenectady.  We would then have to walk a mile to the bus stop where we could then catch a bus to NYC, transfer to another bus, and ride to Baltimore where we would safely get a cab to take us to my car.  Sounds like a great plan, right?  And the tickets only cost us $60 per person!  Trains, buses and cab! 

The biggest problem was that my calculations of time were off (WAY off) and when we arrived in Schenectady, there had been a delay of about 16 minutes.  Those were the 16 minutes I calculated in for our one-mile walk.  We ran (literally, RAN) to the bus stop, which ended up being a Chinese restaurant in a horrible area of town.  Not only had our bus already left 30 minutes prior to our arrival, but the Chinese restaurant wasn't even open!  We were stuck sitting on the curb of a church beside litter and cigarettes for four hours, waiting for the next bus to arrive.  When that bus DID arrive, there were drug deals being done out the windows and two men got in a fist fight while loading the bus.  Of course this whole time, Dan was trying hard to not be too frustrated with me for not calculating in possible train delays.  We ended up pulling into NYC (a horrible part of it nonetheless) at 11pm, and had missed our connecting bus.  We walked about a mile to a train station (the very same one we WOULD have gone through had I just bought us train tickets straight through to Baltimore) and bought tickets to Baltimore.  We ended up arriving in Baltimore around 6am. 

 

I just HAD to tell you that back-story because our latest train adventure is BECAUSE of that trip.  Also, it is oddly similar to it as well... 

 

  

Dan contacted Amtrak after that disaster of a trip and just told them that because there was a delay, we missed all of our connecting buses.  They emailed him back with a voucher for $80 which we could use on any future tickets.  That was a year ago.  Well, late in July, I remembered the voucher and asked Dan to forward it to me.  I found out that that very day was when the voucher would expire if I didn't use it.  So on a whim (it's very important to note that it was on a whim), I purchased two tickets round trip to Albany for a day trip.  We actually only live an hour and a half from Albany, but it was the only place I could think of that was close enough so that I wouldn't have to spend any money, but rather, just use the voucher. 

 

Monday, the 21st of August, we set out on our adventure.  We drove to Fort Edward, where we packed everything into Gwendolyn's stroller and waited for the train.   

 

 

 

 

After boarding the train and enjoying a scenic ride down to Albany, we arrived at the Rensselaer train station at roughly 10:30am.  I had mapped out our trek from the station to our first stop: lunch at a chicken restaurant with cheap prices according to google reviews.  We started walking, and kept walking, following my map.  I got excited when we came to this tunnel, because my goal was to navigate us to the historic district. 

 

I began feeling accomplished, like I finally was making amends for the botched trip to Baltimore last year, when we came near to the place I had planned for us to eat our cheap lunch.  As we were walking up to it, a woman started shouting at us while running with her young child and pushing a baby stroller. 

"You aren't going into McDonalds, are you??" she shouted

I replied that no, we weren't.  McDonalds was right across the street from our chicken destination. 

"Good.  Don't go near there cuz there's a group of drug dealers in there fighting and screaming! They was fighting over the money." she yelled, and continued running away. 

 

We really were struggling to keep up with what she was saying, since her accent was so strong.  But by the time I registered what she was saying, we were upon our chicken place.  They were just opening when we walked up at 11.  To be quite honest, it was filthy. 

There were drug deals taking place all along the sidewalk in front of the shop, and one even inside while we were sitting, waiting for our food.  Our lunch experience consisted of us stuffing our food down so that we could leave, and two men begging for money (although I just said "No, sorry" after asking them to repeat what they were saying about 4 times and STILL couldn't understand them). 

 

We left hurriedly and half ran away from the chicken spot and McDonalds.  We walked another mile to the capitol building.  

My confidence started coming back when I saw it, and especially when we arrived just in time for the next tour at 12.  We really enjoyed touring the ornate building. 

 



 

When we got to this room, I found it fascinating that the building had been worked on for over 20 years.  It cost over $25,000,000 to build and it still isn't complete.  When Teddy Roosevelt became governor of NY, he declared it complete and stopped all work on it (because it ended up costing the state way more than it was supposed to).  These ornate little designed carvings on the walls weren't finished. I thought that was neat. 

 

And the walls are covered in 23k gold... 

 

We learned a lot of fascinating facts about the building, the governors, and the state of NY.  After we finished the tour, we explored a little bit on our own.   

 

Our next stop was going to be the NY State museum.  I remember when I was young and my mother would take us to the PA state museum and I LOVED it.  I figured the NY state museum had to be awesome as well, and since our train didn't leave the Rensselaer station until 5pm, we had the time. 

 

What I DID'NT plan on was that the museum was always closed on Mondays.  So we wandered about for a bit, and then saw a flyer that said we could go to an observation deck of the tallest building in Albany.  So we did that and ended up spending some time there.  When you are up so high, there's so much to see.  There were little diagrams, explaining interesting historical facts about different buildings in the distance as well. 

 

You'd probably need to click on the picture below and zoom in to see it, but the building halfway up the picture on the far right with two white steeples with green domes is the second oldest church in the state.  It also contains the oldest pulpit in the United States.  When we saw that fact, Dan wanted to go see it.   

 

We asked for directions, and then walked there.  We called ahead and the secretary said that we could come see it as long as she was there.  We made it there by 2:30 and enjoyed looking around outside first.  The church has a drive-thru church where people can come and park in their parking lot and just roll down the windows and listen to the service and watch from their cars.  Dan climbed up in the outdoor pulpit and this is what he found. 

 

 

 

This is the auditorium.  Dan is sitting in Theodore Roosevelt's pew.

 

 

After we left there at 3, we still had time to kill, so we walked to the courthouse and were admiring it from the outside and Dan asked the guard if there was anything interesting to see inside.  He was such a nice man and told us a little bit of the history of the building and said that there was stuff to see inside.  We went in and had to go through a pat-down and metal detectors and even had to leave our phones locked up in a box.  Honestly, there wasn't too much to see, except the pictures on the walls.  One thing that WAS interesting was that there was a courtcase going on.  Even though we weren't allowed to go in, Dan discovered that by craning his neck, he could see in the door and saw a man in prison attire testifying at a witness stand.  I tried to see too, but my neck wasn't long enough.  We left there and I remembered that I had a starbucks giftcard in my wallet from years ago.

I don't drink coffee, much less starbucks, but we were hot and sweaty, so drinking a chocolaty, cold milkshake sort of thing was nice.  We then walked back to the train station where we boarded our train right at 5pm. 

We were sitting in our seats, an the train was about to depart when an employee came to take our tickets and they wouldn't scan for him.  After examining them, he told us that the tickets weren't good until the next day! I had booked the tickets for the wrong day! Because the employee on the way TO Albany didn't catch the wrong date, we were able to exchange the tickets to be for Monday.  How awful would that have been to be stuck in Albany with no vehicle?! 

SO there you have it...the truth about my ability to plan trips. 

 

Gwendolyn slept like a baby on the way home.  What a shock, right?

 

 

 

In spite of the mishaps and my bad planning fails, we had a nice time.  We ended up walking 8.5 miles around Albany too, so I got my exercise in. 

What a trip!

(Let's see whom of my readers can quote the next line of the title to this post...?)