The Great Little Train Ride

A town on my side of the state has a restored train that’s almost a 100 years old that they run back and forth to another town a short fourteen miles away. This time of the year it runs for fall color and pumpkin peeping tours but they also do murder mystery excursions, bunny runs in the spring, Santa runs in December and the ever popular Great Train Robberies plus the three car train can be booked for private parties. You can also book special rides on just the engine or the engine pulling the caboose. I’ve wanted to go on this train for a couple of years now and last summer my Red Hat Society chapter took the trip but on a day when I had a long-standing doctor appointment that I couldn’t change without waiting another four months. I was a tad miffed since it was my suggestion that started the ball rolling. But they voted on the date, majority rules and that was that. Democracy, you’ve gotta love it even when it sucks. 

I got another chance to take the train this week when three of my Gathering Girl pals and I managed to get tickets on an excursion sponsored by our senior hall. I hadn’t been on a train since the mid ‘60s when I went to Chicago on a Christmas shopping trip with a group of 10-12 other twenty-somethings in a service sorority I belonged to back in those days. What I remember the most about that group are the candlelight induction ceremonies, the Jackie ‘O’ classic sweaters most of us wore and all the tea and cookies we served for God knows who around the community. Hoity-toity groups like the Daughters of the American Revolutionary War. Who knows why we were there, maybe they were too old to bake their own, darn cookies. It’s a mystery that’s lost in my old brain. I was only in the group a couple of years. Apparently that’s all the candlelight-minus-a-male-across-a-table I could stand. 

Back on topic: The day of the great train ride finally came, a crisp day that had us all wearing winter coats but that didn’t dull my anticipation of having a good time except for the possibility of having to pee while on the train. The only thing I remember about my earlier train ride to Chicago is how hard it was to accomplish that task on a train that swayed from side to side when I was still young enough to hover over public toilet seats instead of actually sitting on them. Growing up my mom drilled it into me that I’d die of a dreadful disease if I didn’t hover, which I did most of my life until my knees got so bad I couldn’t do it anymore. Was that too much information? Thankfully, I didn’t have to pee on this train ride, but I did check out the bathroom and it didn’t look like an outhouse inside like the one I remembered from my ‘60s train ride. Historical accuracy is great in restoration projects but I draw a line at wooden stabs with holes cut in the top and calling it good enough.

Our senior hall bus delivered us to a railroad museum first where we had lunch before getting on the train and getting our tickets punched by a conductor dressed for the 1900s. $39 covered the bus transportation, lunch and the train ride. Not a bad deal for a fun afternoon if the food had been eatable. Those who ordered the beef said it was too tough to eat, while those of us who had the chicken were happily satisfied. My travel mates offered their beef for Levi’s dinner and since I had a pocket full of plastic bags (to pick up poop on his walks) I took it. He loved it but the tough beef and empty stomachs gave we Gathering Girls an excuse to have donuts and coffee after the train ride was over during the time allotted for us to shop the small town while waiting for the bus to take us back home. Our senior hall director thinks no day trip is complete if it doesn't include shopping time.

The train coach seats were designed in such a way that two people faced two others, so close together that our knees were miserably close and overlapping. Before the train was rolling we moved to the dining car. It was great, lots of room to spread out since only eight of the 50 of us on the train made the switch. The conductor was dressed in period garb and as he punched our tickets he got teased about not spelling out words like the conductor on the Polar Express. Having never seen the movie someone had to explain the joke to me. A singer with a guitar sang railroad themed songs for half of our ride and we really got silly taking part in the sing-alongs but otherwise as the train car swayed back and forth it could have easily wooed us to sleep. Someone had an app to measure how fast we were going and we never made it over 12 miles an hour. Why does anyone need an app for that? Are you going to measure how fast you walk? How fast your Uber driver is going? Or maybe a roller-coaster? Inquiring minds want to know. But until a plausible answer comes along I let me say I'm glad I got to check this great little train ride off my Bucket List. ©

Recyling and Junk Yards Now and Then

What do you do on an afternoon in September when the clouds in the sky are whiny and can’t make up their minds if they want to move on by to dump their sorrow elsewhere? You hop on a bus down at the senior hall and head to a recycling center that covers 65 acres where we got to watch a machine shred cars. This place isn’t your standard recycling center where the neighborhood moms and dads conjugate on Saturdays to drop off their newspapers, tin cans, glass bottles and plastic trash. This place is like a modernized junk yard of olden days that, when you think about it, have been recycling long before it became cool. 

I’ve got a long history of going to junk yards. When I was a kid one of my favorite things to do was to go with my dad when he’d take a load of stuff to the junk yard. Back in those days they let you pick through what other people left behind until they got smart and had one of their workers set aside any useable goods and they started selling them out of a building they put up on the property. That place is still there. In its current form it’s a popular place for people restoring old homes to find architectural savage.

Then along came my husband and his three front-end loaders and street sweeper and I was introduced to specialized heavy equipment recycling centers---bone yards. If a part broke on one of those secondhand ‘beasts’ off we went to spend an afternoon out of town at one of the three bone yards in the state where similar equipment could be found. The rule, back in those days, was customers had to disassemble whatever needed to come apart to get at the part they wanted to buy. Unless an extra set of hands was needed, I’d usually be in our pickup truck near-by with the dog, reading a book. People who own places like that were always down to earth and pretty interesting when you got to know them. One guy in particular stands out in my memory. He once charged my husband $60 for a part, then handed one of the twenties to me and said, “Have this guy take you out to dinner tonight. No reason why you should have to cook after keeping him company all afternoon.” You should have seen the look on Don’s face. “Hey, that’s my twenty!” he said. “Not anymore,” the bone yard owner said. “It’s hers now.” He was a sweet guy with a beach front “cottage” in Hawaii. When he died he had a large, marble bulldozer on his grave and, of course, Don and I had to go see it. 

And then there was the junk yard for cars out by Lake Michigan that we always had to stop at on our way to the Big Lake. Not that we needed to buy anything there, but my husband had met the owner at a gas & oil memorabilia swap meet and he had a private museum that you couldn’t get into without an invitation. Don, being a likeable storyteller, finally got the invitation. Come to find out the guy had a one piece glass gas globe that was highly sought after and that knowledge started “the dance.” It took two years but eventually Don talked the guy into to selling him the globe for $6,500. Let me tell, I about had a cow at that price and for something so fragile, having been responsible already for breaking a lesser quality globe. But that hand-painted gas globe was his pride and joy for several decades and when I sold it after he died, I got three times what Don paid for it. The man who bought it, just died and his gas globe collection is up in the air because the out-of-state daughter in charge of the estate is an idiot. I passed along the contact information for the leading appraiser in the field but she'll probably have a junk dealer haul it all away---all 300 globes.

Back on topic: The recycling place we toured today has a set of scales that all the trucks coming into the place have to drive over and it can weigh up to 200,000 pounds per vehicle and trucks never stopped coming and going the whole 2 ½ hours we were there. The place employs over 650 people and 75% of their business is shredding cars. They had mountains of mixed metal including vehicles and every conceivable thing you can name waiting to go through their giant shredder. All that stuff comes out the other side sorted and melted and ready to be sold to industries that use the aluminum, copper, brass, bronze and steel to build new stuff. We got to walk up the 75 steps to the glass tower where a person controlling the shredder works. He monitors 5-6 screens and a computer keyboard making sure everything is working as it should be. While we watched the machine in action we got to see a couple air bags go off as cars got crushed, sending up a cloud white gas. Once in a rare while, he said, if they haven’t gotten all the liquids drained out of a car properly, a fire will start but the machine puts it out quickly. “It’s pretty cool to watch,” he said. “I’m surrounded by flames.” The tour cost a whole six bucks for our transportation. Quite a bargain, don’t you think and the tour also brought back some priceless junk yard memories. ©

NOTE: The photo at the top is what the junk looks like before going through the shredder and next two photos is what the sorted and smelted metal looks like when it comes out the other side of the shredder. And the third photo shows a pile of wiring that somehow in the process of shredding mixed junk gets separated out from rest. Oh, and this place has other areas where they process paper, plastic and electronic equipment into a form that can be used in manufacturing more stuff. This place is where all the community recycling centers and pickup services bring their stuff after they've sorted and bundled it on their sites.

photos off their website

Eagle Nests and Old People Nests

Occasionally my senior hall offers tours of independent and assisted living facilities. Wednesday I hopped on the bus with twenty-four others and off we went to two new places on the other end of town. One fed us lunch and the other served us coffee and the best peanut butter cookies I’ve had since my mom used to make them. Both of these places are the type that steps you up to increased care when you reach a certain point and we learned a lot about those trigger points. One was when you require a two person assist to make transfers. I never would have thought to ask the 'triggers point' question but it’s an important one because the cost of your room about doubles when they step you up. I’ve toured five places like this, but this time we had a guy who came with us who owns a business that specializes in in-home care and assisted living placement. There are a lot of placement specialists around---even national chains that do it---but I never knew much about them. He says they get $2,500 for every client they place, paid for by the facilities and all facilities pay the exact same amount to all the placement specialists in town.

At first, one of these places seemed kind of creepy with all its high tech surveillance gadgets. Each resident wears a watch-like gadget that automatically unlocked AND locks your apartment door, tracks your every move by GPS and gives you a way to talk directly to the staff, and them to you. But the creepy part is they also have motion detectors in your apartments (the units were cute, by the way) and those motion detectors spend two weeks learning your habits---like how many times you pee and how long it takes you to do it, what time you get up and go to bed---then after that if you break your pattern someone will check on you. The staff all wears a red “tag” that electronically logs where they go and how long they stay with each resident and those logs can be reviewed by families. I jokingly asked them if the microwave in your unit is eavesdropping and we were assured that the only listening device is on your arm. Like that’s a big comfort! We talked about this ‘big brother’ kind of care on the bus afterward and at first glance it creeped most of us out but as we talked and compared it to other assisted living places where lights are flashing and call bells are going off in the halls, this place felt less institutional, more homey, and we soften our views on these high tech babysitters.

I am nowhere near needing or wanting to move to an independent or assisted living home but Mr. Specialist says that’s the best time to check them out and make decisions so families aren’t making decisions like that in an emergency situation. He also has resources to calculate if you have enough money to go to places like this compared to in-home care. That “resource calculation” service is free and I'm going to make an appointment with him for that. It will be helpful to know how long my assets would last if/when I need care. Can I afford to redecorate now? Take a trip? The assisted living places we saw this week cost $4,000 a month and doubles if they have to step you up. He said the lowest priced place in town is $1,500 a month and I know it to be a Medicaid dive. When you get through talking to him about your finances, he can tell you the price range you need to stay in and he gives you a list of places in that range. He’ll even drive you around to see them, if you want. I’m thinking whatever he has to say it will be fuel to keep me on my self-imposed, Spring of Getting Physically Fit program. Two person assist transfers? Heck, we all need to make sure we don't need a one person assist if we want to age in place!

This week I also went to a fascinating and funny senior hall lecture about bald eagles. It was delivered by a woman who lives on a pond where a couple of eagles nested for five years and raised fifteen baby eagles, many of which were banded as babies by researchers who climbed up to the nest to take blood samples and weigh the fuss balls and take the cutest baby pictures. The lecturer had wonderful photos and she made you fall in love with the personalities of the nesting mamma and poppa eagles. She wrote poems about the eagles, funny poems that where illustrated with slides. One was about ice fishermen who have their fish snatched by the eagles if they don’t hide them as soon as they reel them in. Others purposely threw their catches on top of the ice just to get a close up view of the eagles diving in for the steal. What a thrill that would be!

I had three options for celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, one with the Red Hat Society girls for lunch out in the boondocks for a traditional, boiled Irish dinner. I called to cancel that because of an impending storm that was supposed to include ice, snow and rain. Another was to go with the Movie and Lunch Club but I had no interest is seeing The Beauty and the Beast so I e-mailed my regrets. Then at the eagle lecturer some friends invited me to tag along with them to an Irish Pub close to where I live. I figured I could get in and out before the storm hit but this morning that got canceled, too. I am SO sick of winter and spring playing chase-and-flee tag with our lives! ©
 

Stock photos, our lecturer was not online.