Trip Report: April 23 to May 8, 2003
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
TO PITTSBURGH AND GREENVILLE, SC
May 1 Pittsburgh to Harrisburg/Hershey
It was time to say goodbye to Western Pennsylvania, for now. While this is the place where Ted was born and raised, to Sylvia, a native of the West Coast, it always seems a very different kind of place and illustrates one of the reasons to travel. After all, if every place was like every other place, why not stay home? Most of the residents have Eastern European names. There are delicious foods from that culture that she never even heard of in the west. Many of the houses are taller than they are wide. Families (such as Ted's) tend to live fairly near each other and to keep in close touch, and help each other out with things like home maintenance and repair projects.
The landscape, the trees, and even the birds are different. In fact, one morning she was sure the sound that woke her was a car alarm going off. It turned out to be simply an unfamiliar Pennsylvania bird with a loud and repetitive cry timed at regular intervals!
After a very comfortable night at the elegant Omni William Penn Hotel, we called for assistance with our baggage. A man with a cart was at our door within 60 seconds.
We arrived at the nearby Amtrak station, sat down with our luggage, and were soon approached by a member of the baggage-handling staff who loaded our 12 pieces of luggage onto a cart. (As usual, we attempted to travel light, but packing our portable office makes that difficult. At any rate, all but two were small pieces.) The on-time Pennsylvanian (which originates in Pittsburgh and terminates in New York City) was called almost immediately. We were seated in Business Class, which are the six rows in the rear half of the last car. The middle of this Amfleet car was occupied by a snack counter; there were coach seats on the other side of that, and three more Amfleet coaches ahead of our car.
Before the train pulled out of the station, the snack bar attendant had cups of coffee on our fold-down trays, and had pulled a curtain between business class and the snack area. The large, business-class seats are in a two-and-one configuration with plenty of leg room. At 6' 3", Ted had about four inches between his knees and the front of the next seat.
"This is like what flying first class used to be like," I remarked. to the snack bar attendant. A pleasant man with a full head of white hair, he mentioned that he had flown professionally for over 20 years as a flight engineer before joining Amtrak. He'd crewed the personal jet of a well-known captain of industry.
Although the scenery was rough, with multi-football-field-size deserted mills and ruined factories in varying stages of rust and decay, the tracks were smooth east of Pittsburgh. "We're on the famous 'Broad Way' of the Pennsylvania Railroad now, four tracks wide," Ted explained.
In spite of this, Norfolk Southern, the present owner of the tracks, was giving us slow orders. Before long, the conductor's voice came over the PA to apologize and to explain that we had a freight train in front of us. But before long, we passed it to the right as it ambled along eastbound on an adjacent track as we gathered speed and passed it.
Soon we were along the Conemaugh River as it passes through the narrow valley of Johnstown, site of the disastrous flood of over a century ago. After reaching the summit of the Appalachian Mountains, at the Gallitzin Tunnel, we began the descent of the eastern slope and soon were traversing the world famous Horseshoe Curve. Observing this engineering marvel, it is amazing to realize that the first train to travel this route did so way back in 1854 after an enormous construction project completed with black powder, pick and shovel, and mules by our dauntless forefathers.
We were in luck today, as there were no other trains blocking our view of the curve. After a brief stop at Altoona, formerly the site of the Pennsylvania RR shops, we began the descent along the Juniata River to its junction with the shallow Susquehanna River. With rocks and sandbanks protruding, it looked as if one could wade across its half-mile width. The rail route crosses on the longest stone-arch bridge in North America, the Rockville Bridge, and to our amazement, we arrived in Harrisburg 25 minutes ahead of schedule. But as the baggage manager at the station explained as he helped us off, this is not unusual as there is quite a bit of padding in the schedule.
A call on our cell phone to Enterprise Rent a Car alerted them to our early arrival, and soon a clean-cut young man in a white shirt and tie was at the station to pick us up in a new Cadillac DeVille. He drove us to their facility a few blocks away and signed us up with polite efficiency. This was a rather unusual experience, as some other car rental companies have under-performed rather consistently on our recent trips. We complimented him on the professional manner in which the transaction was handled, including the upgrade to the Cadillac for only an additional $6.00.
He explained that Enterprise is an unusual company. They hire recent college graduates who major in business management, and who are interested in an apprenticeship arrangement that will groom them to eventually learn how to start and run businesses of their own. Thus the name fits the company, and the personnel are of a higher caliber than competing companies.
A short twelve-mile drive later, we were checking into the historic and extravagantly elegant Hotel Hershey.
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