Time in DC

Dear Lucy,

Moving on from my brief visit in Chicago, I left that night for my next stop in Washington DC. I had remembered to recharge the battery for my camera, unfortunately I recharged the wrong one.

You see, I have the battery that came with the camera and it is on its last leg. I can fully charge it and still only get a couple pics from it. I brought it as a back-up.

That's where I went wrong. I confused my new battery with the half-dead one, so when I checked my bags in (at 4.00 per hour!), and headed out to see the sights, well, I didn't get but two pictures.

Of course the first one I took had beer in it in some form or fashion, (consider the photographer), then the camera died, and I spent the next three hours walking around seeing the sights and not getting a darned pic of them.

I finished walking my feet off and headed back to the train station which is the biggest I have seen so far. It is like a shopping mall with a movie theater and everything.

We no sooner got going out of the station when the train came to a screeching halt. It hit a pedestrian, some young woman taking pictures. We were held up for 4 hours while they scraped her off the train, got a new engineer because ours was so shaken up he couldn't go on, and of course to probably fill out tons of paperwork.

Last I heard from the conductor the woman was in critical condition. The conductor, having worked for Amtrak for many years didn't think the woman would live. It is one of the conductor's jobs to go find the body parts after an accident (there's something to put on your resume), so I figured she knew what she was talking about.

She also said that they have lots of people jumping in front of trains to kill themselves, especially now that times are so tough. She said it's pretty darn certain you will succeed by doing that.

Pretty gruesom.

So, the train managed to catch up by an hour, but I was still 3 hours late getting in to Florida. Didn't matter though, I was so worn out, I just slept.

--Kathy