The Train Ride To Reno

Ah, the train odyssey to Reno…where to start?  My brother recently took the Amtrak from Provo to Reno, and he said it was a fairly pain-free trip. He said he basically just slept the whole way, and I was expecting a similar experience.

I originally had a ticket leaving from Provo, but I had forgotten that the Jimmy Eat World concert was the same night and I already had tickets for the show. I changed my ticket to leave from Salt Lake, which was $20 cheaper. Bonus! I thought I was off to a great start. I left my backpack in a locker at the Greyhound station next to the Amtrak station and walked to the concert. On the walk of 4.5 blocks, I got asked for money eight times. Yep, almost two beggars per block. I usually give beggars money, but damn, I am not a Rockefeller. I briefly considered gathering them all into a circle, throwing some cash on the ground, and yelling, “Survival of the fittest, bitches!”

The concert was good. I have seen Jimmy Eat World eight times now. They promised me a setlist, but some chick snatched it at the end of the show as it was being handed to me. Oh well, I have other setlists from them.

After the show, I walked back to the bus station to get my backpack. I called my mom so that I could feign urgency while passing back through the bum gauntlet. Surprisingly, it worked. I got my bag from the Greyhound locker and got the hell out of there. A word to the wise – don’t hang around Greyhound stations. I saw a drug deal go down last time I was there, and both parties involved kept looking at me the whole time.

When I arrived at the Amtrak station, it was about 45 minutes until my scheduled departure time. I sat down outside on a planter because it was hellishly hot in the station. There were about a dozen other people sitting around. When 11:30PM rolled around and the train was not there, I went inside to see what was up. They said the train was a little over an hour late. Apparently there was train traffic or something.

Suddenly, a Tongan family walked up and sat down. I only mention their race because they were stereotypically large, and later pretended to not understand English when they cut in front of everybody in line. There were what appeared to be two grandmas, one grandpa, two 40-something sisters, a daughter, and a son. The girl, who appeared to be about 11-12 years old, started complaining about being hot. She then took off her shirt. At first I thought maybe I was mistaken, and it was really a boy who just had long hair and bossoms, and was wearing a purple shirt. However, to the extreme discomfort of everybody around, it was indeed a girl. She started walking around, uncomfortably close to other people. It was at this point that I said to myself in utter astonishment, but loud enough to be audible, “What the fudge?!?!” Only I didn’t say fudge. Then the 8-9 year-old boy grabbed a stick and started running around yelling. He started hitting a metal electrical box with the stick, which was extremely loud. The mom started yelling, “Stop it! Stop it!” but didn’t bother to get up or do anything else in the way of parenting.

They finally announced that the train was about 20 minutes out (this was around 1AM), and somebody would come around to give everybody a ticket to tell them which passenger car to get on. I prayed that I would not be on the same car as this family.

Sometimes prayers are not answered. They got car 511 - the same as me. As the train started approaching, they walked past the line of people and stood at the front. When several people started expressing their disapproval, they all started putting their hands up and saying, “No English,” even though everybody had heard them speaking English just minutes earlier. Actually, the grandparents may not have been able to understand, but everybody else clearly did.

As we boarded the train, there were already some people on board, asleep. I took a seat and put my bag next to me in the hopes that nobody would sit by me. The two sisters were the last to get on. Even though they cut to the front of the line, they walked so slow that everybody passed them anyway. Maybe that is why they cut. There was only one set of seats left. One of the sisters yelled out to the other sister, “Just wake someone up and tell them to move!” Several sleeping people woke up at the yelling. Then one of the sisters saw the chair next to me and asked if she could sit there. I said, “There is one open row right there with two seats.” She said, “But we will be squished.” I replied, “Too damn bad. That is not my problem.” She acted offended, but then squished in by her sister. Keep in mind that the sisters were probably 300+ pounds each (not an exaggeration), and it was a ten-hour trip. I was out of sympathy at that point, so I was not about to give up my comfort for some rude behemoths.

I tried my best to sleep, but then the sisters started watching videos on a phone and they didn’t use headphones. They started laughing very loud and making comments to each other using their regular voices; i.e. not voices you would expect people to use at 3AM on a train full of sleeping passengers. Then they broke into a pack of knock-off Oreos and couldn’t seem to figure out how to work the packaging. Again, super loud. I put in my headphones and fell asleep.

I woke up at 6AM to the sound of the riff from “Bad To the Bone” on piano – obviously a phone alarm tone. After about ten times of the riff repeating, I got up to see that both sisters were not in their seats, and the phone was just sitting there. The alarm tone kept going, and I contemplated going over and turning it off. Just as I was about to go over, the girl in the seat in front of the sisters, who was also woken up by the alarm tone, got up and grabbed the phone. It must have been locked, because she set it back down looking very angry. I surmised they had gone downstairs to the restrooms, so I timed them to see how long it would take before they came back to turn off the infernal alarm. I also started penning this memoir, as it is clearly a story that the world needs to hear.

Fifteen excruciating minutes later, they finally returned and shut off the alarm. Everybody was staring daggers at them, but they seemed not to care. They both fell asleep. Then the farting started. I will spare you the details other than noting that they woke themselves up with their own farts. I don't know if it was the noise or because they were so heinous, and frankly, I would rather not delve into that speculation.

I buried my face in the shirt I was using for a pillow, put in my headphones, cranked some Coheed & Cambria, and tried to fall asleep. The silver lining, if you can even consider it that, was that the train’s conductor told a really lame joke as we were arriving in Reno several hours late that made me laugh. It wasn’t really a laugh because it was funny. It was just a laugh at the entirety of the situation. He said a lady approached him when she found out the train was so badly delayed, looking very pregnant. She said, “If we don’t get there soon, you are going to have to deliver this baby.” He responded, “Well, you shouldn’t have gotten on train if you were pregnant.” She replied, “When I got on the train, I wasn’t pregnant.” Yep. That was my trip.