[Click here to see the pictures without the narrative.]
Today, there's a fire near Sycamore Canyon and the smoke fills the neighborhood. I am feeling queasy and find it difficult to finish the last of the perishables before the trip. Normally, for a long train trip, I would pack extra drip-dry travel clothes and a bottle of Febreze, but I am anticipating laundry facilities at Glacier Park Lodge. I do forget to pack my inflatable cushion that I like to use in roomettes, but that's trivial compared to what happens during the trip.
The Southwest Chief to Los Angeles is over 3 hours late, and we don't board until nearly midnight.
The Coast Starlight has left without the Southwest Chief passengers, so Amtrak puts us on a bus from LA to Bakersfield. While we board the bus, Mom's service dog Toby (a 70 lb smooth coat collie) has a panic attack and dives under the steering wheel; Mom's not strong enough to haul him out, so I have to be called up front from my seat to do it.
At Bakersfield we're transferred to a commuter train (San Joaquin #717) to Martinez. No coastal view, no beds, and even worse, no food! Mom's feet can't even touch the floor, and she's miserable the entire ride.
There's a 3 hour layover in Martinez before the Coast Starlight arrives at 10:30 PM, and I manage to find an open restaurant (most here are closed on Monday!) to take food back to Mom at the station. Before the train arrives, we're kicked out of the station so it can close on time. Fortunately, it's not raining.
I don't find out about it until the next day, but it turns out that Mom's bedroom was reassigned to a different car, and the attendant on the original car only knows that her bedroom was sold to someone else. Mom is on the warpath until the conductor comes and straightens things out.
My roomette is on the west side of the train (ideal for the coastal view, which of course I missed), so I don't get a good view of Mt. Shasta this time around. However, I do get some good views that I would have missed while on the east side.
I was looking forward finally to a dinner in the diner car, but I should have remembered from my previous trip that—much like the Texas Eagle / Sunset Limited—the Empire Builder is a composite train, originating in pieces from Portland and Seattle. The train departing from Seattle has the dining car, and the one from Portland has the observation/cafe car. The upshot is that we wind up with crappy box dinners. In fact, given the schedule back to Seattle we never will get a chance to eat dinner in the diner car on this trip.
As on my trip on the Texas Eagle, our sleeping car is on the end of the train, and I have another opportunity to take a picture out the back door.
The train is fully assembled by morning, but for breakfast, we have to walk almost all the way through its length to get to the dining car. That's not a big problem for me, but it is a big problem for Mom: she can barely make it back to her bedroom afterwards.
Even though it's early in the day when we arrive at Glacier Park Lodge, Mom's room is already available, and mine is available soon thereafter. Here is the view from my room:
I am surprised to find there are not only no laundry facilities, but also no transportation to the nearest laundromat. Normally I wouldn't be so fazed by that (it was the same case when I was in Juneau), but had I known this in advance, I would have packed accordingly. After everything else that has happened so far this trip, I am definitely not in a good mood by now.
Here is the view from the main lodge:
This morning we take the shuttle to the Two Medicine Lake boat tour.
Mom stays on the boat for the return trip, but I get off at the far end of the lake and hike back. I'm reasonably well prepared, with long pants, long sleeves, boots, sunscreen, and bug repellant. There's nettles and poison ivy all over the place, and lots of hikers are wearing shorts and sandals; all I can think is: "you'll be sorry!"
As it is, I should also have been wearing gloves: even though I keep a lookout and raise my arms in thick patches, still I manage to brush my left hand against something and get a two day rash. That's another thing I forgot on this trip: my Benadryl cream.
That afternoon I end up washing my underwear in the sink. Dinner at the lodge is by far the best so far this trip. However, tonight they have fireworks, and it seems like they will never end! They start just after 9 PM and don't let up until after midnight.
The Big Sky Circle Tour is canceled! The whole trip was booked around the reservation for this tour, and then we can't even do it! We talk to other Amtrak vacationers, and some were notified of the cancellation three weeks ago and received new vouchers to go on the Sun Tour instead, but some others never got anything about that, and neither did we. The Coast Starlight fiasco was enough of a rip-off, but this really takes the cake.
Later on we are able to reserve a boat tour at St. Mary Lake for tomorrow. For just a little extra, the taxi that would take us to the boat and back to the lodge can instead continue on the entire circle tour, and drop us off directly at the Amtrak station in time to depart for Seattle. We decide to opt for that. Finally, it seems that things will go well after all.
I'm still in bed when I get a call from the front desk: Mom has been found injured on the ground outside, and an ambulance is on the way. When I get there, she's at the foot of a flight of stairs, her head split open like a watermelon, blood all over the place, and her arms, legs, and neck at unnatural angles. Toby is on his leash, but it's wrapped around her arm and they don't want to touch it until the ambulance arrives.
I have a key to Mom's room, so they unhook Toby from the leash and I take him there by the collar. When I return, the ambulance has arrived and they give me her glasses and phone. They tell me it's likely that she'll be transported from the clinic in Browning to one of the regional hospitals. The assistant manager is there (he's the one who called 911), and says that the clinic will have the number of the front desk and he'll give me any updates.
Later I ask him if there are any updates, and he seems to have forgotten that he had promised anything along those lines, but he does say that he has blocked out two extra nights for our rooms. I ask him to find the phone number of the clinic in Browning where Mom has been taken, as well as which taxi company Mom hired for the day trip so it can be canceled.
When I finally call the clinic, I find out that in addition to the head wound, which requires 40 staples, she also has an ankle fracture and a critical neck fracture. I give them my phone number and Mom's insurance information. Later, they call me back and say she also has some lesser spinal and rib fractures, and that she's being transferred to the hospital in Kalispell. At this point I cancel the rooms and flight in Seattle and book myself a hotel room in Kalispell for the next two nights. Since I'm scheduled to leave on the train anyway, I can at least take it as far as Whitefish and take a shuttle to Kalispell. In addition to my own luggage, I am taking Mom's luggage as well as Toby, so I find myself asking for help wherever I can get it.
As I walk Toby to the station, he's quiet and well behaved, but he's still clearly nervous about stairways. At the ticket office, I cancel the roomette and change Mom's bedroom to take me as far as Whitefish. The train is over an hour late. I take one last picture of the lodge before departing:
The car attendant is confused by my ticket, and says she needs to prepare the room for me. Later, she finally figures out that the ticket office assigned me to the wrong bedroom. At Whitefish, the people who were assigned to my bedroom are given Mom's original bedroom instead.
I don't get to my hotel room until midnight; Mom calls me from the hospital for a reasonably lucid summary of what she's been told, but after that I crash pretty hard.
My room at the hotel must have been one of the last ones available, since it's directly below both the breakfast room (so I can hear the scraping of the chairs) and the laundry room (so I can hear the chugga-chugga-chugga-whump-whump-whump of the washing machines).
The hospital is only a couple of miles away, so I walk there with Mom's gadgets, chargers, and insurance cards. I'm surprised how hot it is here, compared to Glacier Park: Kalispell looks a lot like Prescott AZ, and the temperatures are about the same right now.
The doctors say that most people would have died from the injuries Mom has sustained. Still, she has the option to get surgery in Kalispell or in Flagstaff. Since Mom has a surgeon already in Flagstaff who's familiar with her neck and back, she wants to go back there ASAP. I agree whole-heartedly: I just want to get the hell back home. Because Mom is in no condition to go on a commercial flight, they're working on arranging a medical flight.
This afternoon I do laundry (finally!) and extend my booking at the Best Western to include Monday night.
I discover that there is public point-to-point transportation in Kalispell, called the Mountain Climber. I download their app on my phone, and plan to use it the next time I go to the hospital. I also add the local taxi to my phone so I can call when it's finally time to pack out. No news yet as of this morning, but Mom says I should book another night at the hotel.
Speaking of which, the hotel has a nice yard in the back with grass, shrubs, trees, and a small pond. This is where I take Toby walking:
Later, I find out that Mom's regular insurance won't cover a medical flight. I contact the travel insurance, and they will have a medical team review the case. They send me a list of what they need (Treating Physician contact info, medical records, photo ID, insurance cards, etc.) and I will go to the hospital in the morning to get that together.
I bring some additional items to the hospital in the morning. After I return to the hotel, the case manager calls and wants a confab back at the hotel. Toby is welcome to visit, so I bring him along.
It turns out that the travel insurance won't cover a medical transport either, because Mom can receive treatment here in Kalispell. After surgery and rehab—which will last at least two weeks—then maybe they will cover commercial transport back, possibly accompanied by a nurse. Also, the neurosurgeon recommends that she not travel by any means yet. Basically, she's stuck here until she's stable enough to go home by conventional means.
There's nothing more I can do here. Toby can't stay, and I can't fly home with Toby because he's not my service animal. So, the only option remaining is to rent a car to take Toby back to Flagstaff.
The Mountain Climber doesn't go out to the airport, so I take a taxi to pick up my rental car. Once I have it, I drop off Mom's luggage at the hospital, pack up the rest of the things, and take Toby for a final walk before hitting the road. Here's one last view of the back yard:
Here's the rental car:
I travel down US 93 S to I 90 E to I 15 S to Dillon, MT—294 miles—and spend the night at the Best Western there. I'll do a longer route tomorrow.
The drive through Montana is quite scenic, but at times the haze from wildfires is thick enough to obscure the mountains.
I continue along I 15 S to Springville, UT—400 miles. One more stretch of equal mileage will take me to Boulder City, and then home on Saturday. The scenery basically vanishes once I leave Montana. In Idaho, the Tetons are so distant that they are obscured by the haze. The haze continues in Utah, but the Best Western in Springville has a scenic view.
There's nothing on this stretch that I haven't seen before—400 miles to the Best Western in Boulder City NV, at which I stayed on another trip. It's one of my two favorite BWs, the other one being in Holbrook AZ. Not that there's anything special about either hotel, but for some odd reason I really like both towns.
And now I'm on the home stretch—224 miles.
That's it for travel this year. I was planning to do the Mt. Graham observatory tour this fall, but I see it's already sold out. Hopefully next year.
In the end, I'm thankful that Mom wasn't killed, but times are going to be tough for a while, in terms of managing domestic affairs.
July 13, 2024