When I was asked to chaperone the Close Up trip, I was super excited to go along on the teacher program. History and social studies certainly are not my strong academic suits and American history is probably one of my worst! (I'm a bad American like that, I know. I really would like to learn more, but I don't think that is going to happen until this little thing I like to call my current Master's degree is finished.) I really had every intention of staying on teacher program every day, but I decided to rebel a little on that Tuesday. (It wasn't really rebelling, but I still felt like I was getting away with something.)
I had been trying to meet up with my brother since we were only three-ish hours apart, but it just didn't look like our schedules were going to jive. I looked at going to meet him at his home, but train tickets were so expensive... like over half of what I would spend on a roundtrip plane ticket! Finally, Shaun's girlfriend found a killer (from everything else we had been seeing) return ticket so, before I really knew what had happened, I had booked a train ticket on Monday night to visit my brother on Tuesday!
My morning started out at the lovely hour of 4:45 so I could try to beat the rush hour metro. I clearly overestimated my travel time and arrived to the train station a whopping 45 minutes earlier than I anticipated and 90 minutes before I really even needed to be there. Now, I have ridden the Amtrak train plenty of times before, but this was my first time using a multi-terminal (is that the appropriate term?) train station. They sure do things much differently in the big city than we do in rural North Dakota! I found my train and waited in my semi-conscious, don't-talk-to-me-it's-before-11-am state of being. I took a simple two hour train ride to Philadelphia and then switched trains for a quick 20 minute ride to my brother's!
He and Kayla met me at the train station and we enjoyed a lovely day of not doing very much! They drove me around their towns (all of the towns run together where they live... it's hard to know where one town stops and another one begins), showed me their apartment, took me out for lunch at a local short order diner, walked their favorite mall, and then just chilled at Kayla's parent's house. We didn't DO much per se, but it was such a fun afternoon of being together and seeing a little bit of their lives. I was scheduled to get back on the train at 4:30, but it was almost 20 minutes late so it was nice just to get those couple of extra minutes with my brother. Then I made my train and metro journey back to D.C. where it was nice to see my students after their day as well.
It turns out I didn't miss much on teacher program that day, either. The program I would have attended had I not visited Shaun ended up getting cancelled that day so many of the teachers just bummed the day at the hotel. Definitely a day well spent and I'm looking forward to them visiting North Dakota this summer!
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