Trains & Automobiles

On Thursday, I took a day off work to ride the train up to Williston, ND. Williston is about 2.5 hours North of Medora and, although dirt cheap gas prices make the train far from the most economical way to get here, I was getting sick of driving and wanted to give my car a break.

I love taking the train places. I've taken it round trip to Glacier National Park three times. Both Williston & East Glacier sit on the Empire Builder route, which starts in Chicago and ends up in Seattle and Portland - it comes through every stop once a day both directions. If I had enough time, I'd pick the train over an airline any day. The footroom is about four times larger than a plane's, you can get up and walk around, sit in the lounge car with giant windows, meet some interesting people over a sit-down meal in the dining car, and best of all, enjoy the view. They have sleeper cars for anyone that's willing to part with a lot of money, and coach for people like me who are ok with "roughing it" during the night.

One con for taking Amtrak is that the trains are always late. One hour is normal, but I have a friend who arrived at her destination over 18 hours late due to some unfortunate circumstances and the weather. It's never been that bad for me, but on Wednesday night I ended up leaving Winona, MN at 10:30pm instead of the scheduled 7:50pm, but arrived only 1.5 hours late - pretty good, I thought. When taking the train you have to be very flexible.

Being in Williston gave Nathan and I a chance to stop at Fort Union on our way home. An old Indian trading post on the Santa Fe trail, it was established in 1851 and lasted for about 40 years. The site, which is now run by the National Park Service, is supposedly very active in summer with living history and a chance to see what it was like in the 1800's. In winter, it is protected not only by its thin white walls, but a jetstream of the coldest wind you'll ever feel in your life. You have to really want to visit Fort Union in winter to make it to the gate. We did, and saw the small museum and defense tower.



Was it worth it? Probably not - wait until July, but the trip did allow us to see the wreckage of some derailed grain cars, which is always nice to see a week before you have to climb back on the Amtrak!

Smart Planet

Despite returning from Tanzania over three months ago, the world is still interested in the Corporate Services Corps. I was interviewed by our local TV news station on Tuesday about the CSC and they did a good job of tying it in with IBM & Obama's latest message of change and turning our planet into a "smart planet". Take a look and click on the camera icon to see the clip!

KTTC Story

New Year

This is my first post of the New Year and it's already January 18th. That should tell you how busy the year's been already!

I have mixed feelings about 2009. The promise of new beginnings is still there, just like any year, but this one is already tainted with media rumors of the worst recession since the Great Depression and massive jobs loss. At IBM, they're only predicting a 4% reduction of staff, but at a company of 386,000 employees, that's a whopping 16,000 people. The ax should drop sometime in the next two weeks. Lucky for us, that's no where near what some other tech companies are reporting. For instance, Microsoft may cut 17% and no one seems very excited about the new Windows 7.0.

On the good news front, since the year rolled over, my 401K losses don't seem as depressing. I've only lost 5% since the beginning of the year, instead of 37.94%. My bi-weekly commute to North Dakota now costs me $30-40 one way instead of the $60 it did last year. Best of all, people are not buying useless things like the one-click butter cutter or faux sky lights that seem to exist only to clutter our houses and hurt the environment.

As for me, I plan to tackle my pocketbook by living a little more sustainably. Nathan and I are ordering a vegetarian cook-book to reduce our meat consumption and I'm pondering buying this, which will turn my bike into exercise equipment and a small power generator. I think it's going to be a good year.