After three weeks of living itinerantly as we traveled across the country, our 28-day stay on the Cap Cleveland was going to be the longest we’d be “in one place”, so we were anxious to see what the “owner’s cabin” accommodations were like.
The room is about 12 feet wide by 15 feet deep, all carpeted, with a single curtained window at one end (it would be an insult to call it a porthole). The view out is straight ahead, and when we boarded, it was not blocked by containers (though they were still loading the ship). There’s a double-bed in the corner with drawers underneath, a couch, a coffee table, a desk with a nice chair, a small fridge, a TV with a DVD player, a bookshelf, an armoire with drawers, and a bathroom with shower, toilet, sink, and medicine cabinet.
All this and it didn’t feel cramped, which immediately put us at ease. The only downside, so far, is that the AC broke on the ship on its way to Philadelphia. They tried to get a replacement part there, but it was the wrong one. We’re in Savannah as I write this (Friday), and HOPING that they get it fixed.
View from the doorView from the couch (as Stephanie opens the bathroom door)The window
Since Monday was a holiday, we called our Philadelphia boat contact on Friday from DC. Was the Cap Cleveland still leaving on September 7th? Yes, he said, the boat was slated to arrive that morning and would depart that night. He said we should show up at 6pm, but of course call Tuesday morning to confirm.
So we enjoyed a lovely Labor Day weekend with my cousin Chris, his wife Fran, and their two children Emma and Luke in New Jersey (they live across the river from Philly). I met Emma just a few weeks after she was born, shortly before I moved to California (five years ago). Here I was once again intersecting with them at another major juncture in my life. It’s funny how that happens.
Emma and Justin on laptops
Tuesday morning I called to confirm the boat details, and spoke with someone who said we should show up “at lunch” instead. Ohhhk. Change of plans, but it actually worked out pretty well. I was able to get a much needed haircut at a local barber, then we packed our bags, sent Emma off to her afternoon preschool, and Fran drove us over to the Philadelphia marine terminal. Here’s a neat satellite image of the area with what might have been the Cap Cleveland being loaded with containers.
In New Jersey (or at least in Collingswood), they have a local specialty called “water ice”. I’m not exactly sure what constitutes water ice, but I would say that sherbet is a close approximation. We had some with Emma on Monday, Labor Day, the last day that their local pool was open for the season.
Consider the blog up-to-date (for now). It’s still Saturday, and I’m going to write about Saturday. But first, Friday.
We arrived at my second-cousin’s apartment in Adams Morgan, and caught up on our blogs. The end.
Ok, not exactly. First we walked around the corner for lunch at a Mediterranean place, having missed breakfast on the train, and then we caught up on our blogs. It was like old times, in separate rooms, sending occasional notes and links via Gmail Chat. For dinner we went out for tapas and mojitos. That was all we did. This very chill day is what inspired the first paragraph of Gumbo with every meal, please.
On Saturday we got up with purpose. We cabbed down to the Lincoln Memorial and hit “the mall”. The weather was just beautiful, blue skies with a few clouds, but not too hot, which made for great walking weather.
First we checked out the dinosaur bones at National Museum of Natural History, and then we surveyed the Renaissance art at the National Gallery of Art. We spent a good deal of time in the Air and Space Museum (paying my respects to a certain orange aircraft), before finishing the tour off at the Capitol building.
The overnight slow-train from Nice to Paris was 10 hours. San Antonio to New Orleans: 16. New Orleans to Washington, DC? 26 hours straight! We woke up at 6 on Thursday morning, got to the train station by 6:30, and were moving across the landscape at 7:05. Neither of us slept well the night before so we were a little out of it. Luckily our compartment was a tad more spacious than the one on the Sunset Limited, with an elevator bunk for more head room, windows for the top bunk, and our very own toilet and fold-up sink in the room!
Amtrak Station in New Orleans
The hours actually passed pretty quickly. We had our first on-train breakfast: Stephanie had scrambled eggs and I had french toast. We sat across from a nice couple from Lafayette and chatted about catching gators, good food, and their French-speaking Cajun grandparents. We had lunch with a nice older couple from Anniston, AL who couldn’t wait to get back to the comforts of home after a week in New Orleans—Steph had a burger, I had a salad. And we had dinner with a woman who never said a word to us—I had a stuffed pasta, but ended up eating half of Stephanie’s broiled catfish and rice instead.
Lake Pontchartrain
We went to bed around the Georgia-South Carolina border, hoping the wrath of Hurricane Earl would stay off-shore (it did), and we woke up on Friday just before Alexandria, VA. We were still putting our bags back together when the train pulled into Washington DC’s Union Station. It would continue on to Philadelphia and New York, but we were getting off there, staying at a second-cousin’s vacant apartment for two days to do a little sightseeing.
