Tag Archives: Delaware

My Trip to Delaware, Part Three: Why I Was There

16 May

May 16, 2013

We arrived in Delaware without incident, but it was close. In Trenton there was a “if you see something say something” situation. The train pulled in to the station it was mostly empty. A few people got off, a few got on, and the station was more or less deserted. But from where I sat on the train, looking out the window and around the station, I saw a pink duffel bag sitting under a bench. A few people walked by but no one seemed to notice it and if they did, there was no one on the platform to report it too. I sat for a few minutes and wondered what, if anything to do, when the train pulled out.

Luckily (if sadly) it was most likely a little girl’s lost luggage since the Trenton Amtrak station , to this day, is still standing.

If You See Something, Say Something.

 

We pulled in to the train station and went outside to wait for our ride. While there, we met up with the missing fourth member of the team. She made the train at the last-minute and had to stand most of the trip. Meanwhile, we were standing some more, about half an hour more, while we waited for our ride.

This made no sense to any of us. Directly across the street from the station was a large office complex, our destination. We were waiting for a ride to pick us up and bring us across a nearly empty street. The building was so close that a half-way decent baseball player, or an exceptional Met, could have hit a pop fly to the lobby.

While we were standing there our ride arrived, and to my surprise it was the local regional superintendent for my Company. At the same time, my direct supervisor received a text that the location had changed. Nice timing. Poor planning but nice timing.

The first day of the trip was simply attending an all-associate meeting by the head of the Company In Which I Am Employed. I have sat at my desk and teleconferenced about ten of these so it was truly a waste of time to attend in person. But we had about two hours to kill before the meeting so my group and some related groups retreated to a private room in the conference center to do some team building exercises. In my days as a teacher I did dozens of those and they were not worth a two-hour train ride to another state. We tossed a beach ball around and whoever caught it answered a question like “if you had a yacht what would you name it?” (May answer- “Not The Titanic because I don’t want it to sink.”) and “If you could have the world’s largest collection of something, what would it be?” (My answer- “$100 bills.”) I was not asked “if you had any car in the world, which would you most like to drive?” (My answer- “The Batmobile.”)

My conference was not nearly this important or interesting

My conference was not nearly this important or interesting

 

Wilmington Delaware is about as big as my bedroom but has less to do. After the amazing Day One festivities ended at 3:00, my team waited for the hotel shuttle to pick us up. There was a very large, very nice, and very convenient hotel right across the street but due to circumstances beyond my control (my supervisor screwed up) we booked late and the hotel was full. We ended up staying in a hotel not just at the other end of town, but the other end of another town entirely.

We sat on a bench in the parking lot for over an hour and a half, during which I split my time between calling home and complaining and taking pictures of the minor league ballpark at the other end of the lot. (You can see my great pictures by clicking here.)

Not only had we traveled all morning and were tired, but we were also starving since our conference featured a “working lunch,” in which I had bites of a tuna wrap in between catching the beach ball. The highlight of the meeting was seeing the lone Canadian representative cut the stem off a strawberry with a fork.

hotel_shuttleAfter much pacing, grumbling, and complaining, the shuttle arrived and took us to our hotel. Normally, the driver explained, the trip to the hotel was only 25 minutes, but because of construction we would be taking a detour and would arrive in only 40 minutes. None of us were happy. When the driver asked where we were from, my boss literally kicked the back of my seat and said “answer him.” I had to ask him to repeat the question since I had totally zoned out as soon as I got on the shuttle, day dreaming about ditching all responsibility and going the heck home.

Meanwhile, later that night, other people from my company went out for fancy dinners, shopped in a fancy mall, or caught a movie. Not my team. We were stuck in the hotel.

Our hotel was located at the intersection of two highways and a swamp.

 

TO BE CONCLUDED

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My Trip to Delaware, Part Two: Amtrak

15 May

May 15, 2013

My boss and I boarded the train. No matter what Penn Station looks like above, below it is as grimy as any other NYC train station.

I took a window seat a couple of rows back from my boss and settled in. The seat was comfortable and there were outlets under the window so I was able to charge my iPod during the ride. Eventually someone sat next to me and the only minor inconvenience of the entire trip was that, to charge his laptop, the power cord had to run past my legs to get to the outlets.

I pulled down the tray from the back of the seat ahead of me and took out my book. I planned to read and listen to music on the trip, and maybe even catch a nap. For the first five minutes I stuck to the plan and read a couple of pages, but then we came out of the tunnel, left the city, and in the blink of an eye were in, well, not the country, but rural back roads. It reminded me of Batman where the Batmobile leave the Batcave and is instantly in Gotham city, only in reverse.  I knew we were in New Jersey because the train tracks took us through some seemingly endless swamps.

At this point I put down my book and never picked it up again. From here on the scenery fascinated me. None of it was beautiful in the traditional sense, and in fact much of it was downright ugly, but all of it had as undefinable sense of Americana to it. We didn’t pass through expensive neighborhoods and fancy towns, we rode through the old industrial Northeast, a place of abandoned factories, rusty hulks of cars, trucks, trains, and buildings, a place of old towns, run down homes, and on the whole, shadows and remnants of an America where people actually built things and sold things to each other.

My only regret is that I could not take pictures from the swift-moving train.

brasovFactoryAt one point we passed an abandoned Congoleum factory. Congoleum still makes floor tiles and other flooring products, but they left this area years ago. The factory still had the faded letters on the smokestack, but the main building was, like most of the factories we passed, in a state of collapse. Whole walls were gone, you could see right through the building. I passed dozens of factories, but none of them looked like they had produced a single item in the last three decades.

Meanwhile, the swamps of New Jersey were left behind, but not before one of the stranger sights I saw. From the moment we entered the swamp, a series of telephone poles were running parallel to us through the water. They were all half-sunken in the swamp but the lines were unbroken, giving the impression that they were still carrying live phone lines. But before the poles ended, the phone lines from the last pole went directly down into the swamp. They hadn’t fallen, they left the pole at a taught 45 degree angle and went, purposefully it seemed, into the swamp.

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Immediately after that Twilight Zone scene we roared over a bridge which, hand to my heart, seemed to be made entirely out of rust. The rain let out a totally cartoony sounding “choo-choo!” and we were on solid ground.

If you want to see the rustic side of America, you must travel by train. But be warned, this route really puts the rust in rustic. I saw so many rusted out vehicles that my eyeballs needed a tetanus shot.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAmerica’s back roads really are fascinating. On a side track, I saw a genuine Northwest Pacific cattle car. On old billboards I saw faded mottoes. (“Trenton makes the world takes.”)
I saw backyards where people constructed whole other houses out of tires and old toys.
I passed through an area that may have been part of the New Jersey Pine Barrens where I saw nothing but fields and fields of downed trees left over from Hurricane Sandy, and other than the train passengers, probably no other people would see them.
I saw one grove of standing trees where hundreds of white plastic bags were hung from the lowest branches, none more than six feet off the ground. They looked might they could have been bird or animal feeders but I could not tell.

The economy really hit this area hard. Amtrak and other rail lines, just by their very nature, are going to run through industrial or poor areas, but I saw towns with almost no people on the streets at 9 am, shopping centers that were open but whose parking lots were empty, and many, many homes in desperate need of repair.

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This may all sound sad and in many ways it was, but I did not take my eyes off the scenery the whole trip.  I arrived in Wilmington and put my book back in my bag, only four pages read.

 

TO BE CONTINUED

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