Trip four has finally started. This trip will visit 14 sites in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.
Rather than make the two-day drive from Florida to Maryland, I decided to try Amtrak’s “AutoTrain”. For those not familiar, this train runs from Sanford, Florida (just northeast of Orlando) to Lorton, Virginia, just southwest of Washington, DC.
The train, as its name suggests, loads your automobile onto a freight car and has it waiting for you at the other end. It runs overnight, taking about 16 hours, but it saves two days of me driving and the cost of a motel room.
Unfortunately, the train arrived almost 3 hours late which meant everything was going to be late. To their credit, we boarded less than an hour late, though we then had to wait for all the separate segments of the train to be joined together.
Nonetheless, it’s 6:35 as I write this and we are rolling through the mid-Florida countryside at 45 mph. No high-speed trains here!!
Arrival was scheduled for around 10:00am, but I suspect that we will be late. Expecting possible delays, I had nothing specific planned for after arrival. It will probably take a few hours to offload all of the cars. If we are early, I will find a park to visit. Otherwise I will head to the hotel for the night and head out to my first park site on Wednesday.
Steve
