Thursday, June 17. The Train Trip Is On. No Food All Day. I finally made contact with Amtrak about the Eat Club trip I'd like to make to Chicago this fall. We took that trip six years ago and, although a few people with us discovered that train travel is not for everybody, it was a memorable adventure. People have been asking me about a reprise ever since. Since we're not doing a cruise for the rest of this year, the train voyage--again to Chicago, because of the convenience of the rail service from here to there--sounded like a good plan.
Working through Amtrak's knotted-up reservation system is something I have a lot of experience with. Yet it always astonishes me how little imagination the outfit has, and how unempowered (or lacking in initiative) its agents are. Trying to persuade them that I really did want sleeper space for twenty-four people was absurdly difficult. I guess most of their groups go coach all the way.
We finally worked it out, and I was pleased with the prices. Although significantly higher than airfares, they came in lower than I was expecting--$345 for the economy room, $452 for the deluxe bedroom. I must pay for all twelve compartments in a month, however. I hope I can sell twenty-four people on the idea by then.
That ate an hour of my time. More than an hour went into trying to figure out why the messageboard on the web site has bogged down. Network Solutions has done it again: some sort of software problem on their servers, affecting hundreds of websites they host. Give us forty-eight hours, they said. I am writing this a week later, and it's still not fixed.
At the radio station, I found three commercials that needed to be written and recorded. If all goes well, it takes me about twenty minutes to write a commercial and ten minutes to record and edit it. (I am unusual among talk show hosts in producing all my own spots without assistance.)
But all did not go well. At the end of a three-hour talk show, preceded by a morning of writing several thousand words, the day after an Eat Club dinner keeps me out late, my brain is jelly. And my voice needs a rest. It was nine-fifteen before I left the station. Too late to have a serious dinner. But I couldn't think of a place to have a non-serious dinner, and the next thing I knew I was on the Causeway, heading home. I prefer to skip a meal instead of availing myself of fast food. But I'd had no lunch today, either.
At home I went through the capicola left over from Mary Leigh's graduation party two weeks ago. And some wedges of Dubliner cheese (I love that stuff). A slice of raisin toast. This is a hell of a state of affairs for the Dean of American Restaurant Critics. The Marys were already asleep when I came in, so I didn't even have anyone to complain to. (Not that they would have given a care if they had been awake.) Bah.
