I turn 20 tomorrow. I just got a calendar notification for “Natalie’s 20th Birthday” on my laptop. It feels fucking weird. I’m on a birthday trip to Chicago with my partner Ren—by Amtrak of course. We’re on the Zephyr, it’s Ren’s first time, and we’re having a great time.

Monday (8:35am) - Wednesday (2:30pm) #

Amtrak math: your seat is bigger when your partner sits next to you.

I’ve fallen into photography YouTube again, and it’s making me want to try film. My friend Vallery loaned a film camera (more than?) a year ago, and I’ve yet to touch it, but I think I’ll finally start to play with it. The original idea was for me to shoot some nature-y scenes, and then her to shoot over it through bus windows, I think. I recently found the camera going through some of my stuff.

I’ve been enjoying shooting on my Fuji X-T30 II a lot lately. I installed a cheap Chinese grip and removed the left cage part of it so that it just heightens the body and adds a bigger grip area, and it’s made the camera far more comfortable to hold. It also gives me better mounting points for my Peak Design strap’s anchor links.

Riding the first train out of the Bay after pride weekend is amazing, highly recommend it if you’re not a raging homophobe. We’ve befriended so many queer people, and the train has above average style.

This is going to be an evolving post (finally, a use for my tended/planted thing) over this trip, so check back, or don’t.

We’ve got our bikes on this train, and there’s a private car—Bella Vista—owned by Friends of the 261, a heritage railroad that seems to be in the business of preserving the Milwaukee Road. If I won the lottery, I’ll charter a private car trans-con, SF to NYC. Maybe I could convince Caltrain to let me start in SF, though it seems Mr Lipps isn’t super fond of me (long story; not everyone takes criticism well).

The desert is so beautiful. It’s a landscape I’m trying to appreciate more. I’d love to spend some time out here but it’s known for being home to Christian Nationalism. Last I checked they aren’t too fond of girls who were once boys. (Sir, your son looks like a girl).

I’m thinking of ditching Lightroom for Capture One (or apple photos, as recommended by Harper Reed’s blog)¹. I need a decent app that can handle RAWs on my phone, and then I can truly be fully liberated from the oppressive boot of the jpeg and adobe. As an experiment, all the photos for this post will be imported and edited using Photos.

I’m still loving my Fuji X-T30 II. I’m trying to treat it a little more like a film camera (more time to set up shots, less spray and pray), and so far enjoying how that makes me shoot.

Traveling on Amtrak is reigniting the map making desire fire in me again. I never thought I’d say this but school can’t start soon enough, I’m excited to learn GIS. I’m tempted to teach myself QGIS in the mean time.

I woke up at 5:30 today in western Utah, in some sort of mountain pass, and it was beautiful. I stayed up to watch the sunrise before going back to sleep, I’ve never felt so peaceful.

I’m not feeling much different. I say something along these lines every year, and I don’t know why I always expect something to suddenly change because an arbitrary set of arbitrary units of time have passed. I think this year is the least I’ve thought about my birthday before it happened. We got thai food near the hotel for dinner, it was pretty good.

Wednesday - birfday #

Unfortunately, chicago is more than a little addicted to cars. The underground roads and ramps everywhere, wide streets and Lakeshore drive are a big bummer. also, trump tower, lol, go away.

Chicago does their fireworks on the 3rd (probably because of my birthday), so we went toward the lake to watch them. The stacked roads of the Loop are crazy. The fireworks lasted a not-too-long ten minutes, and were pretty good.

I’m wanting to start a newsletter or roundup or something. If I keep wanting to in a couple weeks, I’ll consider setting something up.

Thursday - beautiful riding #

Today (the 4th), we had a late start, had a big breakfast that included an oreo latte (better than expected and almost as good as i wanted it to be!), and then meandered our way up the lake front trail, which is amazing. I think I get the Chicago hype that has a vise grip on the urbanist internet now. It was beautiful, this is a beautiful city.

I really like Chicago. I’ve been here a couple times, but this time I’m very impressed. Chicago is a very American-feeling city in a way that LA and NYC don’t.

I think Chicago has the best buildings, but it’s overall skyline is a little boring imo. This view is pretty good though. The hotel TV has just informed me that Shark Week is next week, which is exciting.

Friday - last day downtown #

We went to visit Central Camera, which might be the Scenic Routes of camera stores. Ren got a UV filter and I got an orange filter guy. I asked one of the staff and they recommended the Pentax K1000 as a first film camera. I’m film-curious, but a little scared about how expensive it can be. Strong opinions welcome.²

“You could benefit from being more judicious about picking up new expensive hobbies” —My friend

I picked up an orange filter for my 35mm lens and I’m loving it. It’s fun to modify photos without software.

Today was our last day in the hotel, so we checked out, dropped our bags and headed out on our bikes. We tried taking the L but it was too crowded, so we ditched after 2 stops and rode to the Chicago History Museum, which was a nice ride. The bike infra so far is comfortable, but could stand to be more protected. I won’t throw stones in a glass house though. We’re staying with our friend Piero.

“Go find me a bar, I’m going to the casino to win my money back.” Overheard at Michigan and Ontario.

Rode Ren’s bike. It rips post-modifications. On our way to our friend’s apartment, a woman asked us if we traveled here from California. She proceeded to talk toat us about bike advocacy in Chicago. Among the notable quotes are “bike police are good, we like them” and “they’re pitching parents against non parents.” Reminds me of a type of “urbanist” we have back home. A no car but might not take the bus type.

I’m itching to get back into building cool stuff on the computer. I might try to play with some digital programmatic map stuff again. Just learned about protomaps, which is cool.

Saturday - go Cubs #

Wrigley Field is incredible. We biked down Clark St to the ballpark. Wrigleyville, the neighborhood it’s in, is fantastic. The park feels so integrated into the neighborhood, and the whole area is beautiful. My reference for ballparks is Pac Bell Park in San Francisco, and this is way better. They also have a cool old scoreboard that seems to use a matrix of light bulbs and has manually set scores for other games going on.

The ride to the ballpark was really nice. Clark has continuous bike lanes, often protected, and some cool raised protected bike lane/bus boarding island interactions.

We met back up with Piero, and took a ride on the Purple Line, which is ridden with 6mph slow zones. We walked to the Bahá’í House of Worship. My photos sucked. Then we walked to a beach nearby, which was pretty. We headed back south, got pizza and called it a night.

Sunday - our last full day #

We set out with intentions to get to the Chicago Architecture Center in the Loop, but that got derailed (my fault). We ended up at a cafe on Broadway at Wilson called Stan’s Coffee and Donuts, which had pretty good vibes. The highlight of it was definitely looking out the window at Wilson Station on the Red and Purple lines. It has a modern station house and an old one, that seems to be disused now. It started raining, so we hunkered down in the cafe for a while. A trans woman came in with almost the exact tattoo I’ve been dreaming of for months, in the exact place I want it, which was kind of shocking.³

We eventually decided we wanted to move, mostly because our laptops died. We decided to ride through the pouring but warm rain to Ritual Coffee House (right by the Brown Line) on Irving Park. The ride was fun and very very very wet. There was a slight second of regretting taking off our fenders on the eve of the trip, but that didn’t last long. We walked into the cafe literally dripping wet. When I pulled out my notebook wallet to pay, the barista asked where I got it from and said her boyfriend would love it (heterosexuality claims another victim!), so I wrote down the very long Etsy product name of it for her.

Leather Journal Cover for Moleskine Cahier Notebook Pocket size with pen holder 3.5" x 5.5" Field Notes Cover Personalized Refillable

On the wall I spotted a poster for a Courtney Barnett show in Chicago on the 26th. Her album Things Take Time, Take Time is great. Against the same wall is a huge record shelf, and the record player played jazz, dad rock, and some unplaceable (for me) stuff.

Monday - back on the rails #

To get to Union Station from Ravenswood, we decided it would be easier to take Metra with our bikes and bags. We took the 11:32 train from Ravenswood station. As we waited for the door to the marked bike car toward the rear of the train to open, the conductor began shouting at us. We ran over toward him and the doors that were opening while he screamed and swore at us. Ren fell getting their bike on, and we both got scraped up having to hurry up gallery car steps while carrying our bikes and bags. The conductor had sent us into a non bike car, so we were forced to obstruct the ADA area. When he came by to check our tickets, he was increasingly rude. I don’t want to recount the whole thing here, but I’ve archived Ren’s tweets about the experience here.

Metra wayfinding also sucks. They run trains on the left side (reverse of American normal), and platforms are labelled with the less-than-intuitive “To Chicago” or “From Chicago.”

The UP-N terminal is Ogilvie (Chicago has like 5 mainline terminals), and Amtrak runs out of Union, so we had to walk a couple blocks down Clinton, which wasn’t awful, but it seems crazy that stations that are in line with each other aren’t connected or consolidated.

Miraculously, I took no photos of Chicago Union Station this trip. When I went to baggage to pick up our bike tags, the attendant told me to head with the sleepers and tell boarding staff we have bikes. We did and they let us board with the sleepers, which was nice and gave us an opportunity to get our bikes to the baggage car in the front of the train and get settled before the masses got on.

At our midnight-ish fueling stop in Omaha, Ren and I ran up and down the platform and I got a couple mosquito bites, which I had managed to escape up till then. The bites are making me miss San Francisco, where there are very few mosquitos because of a DPH vector control program that pays bike messengers to drop larvae poison into storm drains (that’s what those little painted dots on storm drains are).

Tuesday Moon Siren #

It’s Tuesday and we’re being mooned from the Colorado River. Each time the observation car erupts in laughs, which I’m dubbing the Tuesday Moon Siren.

We stopped about 30 minutes after the mooning due to UP track work to mitigate rail thermal expansion (it’s been > 70°F everywhere we’ve been on this trip). Eventually we started moving toward the next signal again, and then suddenly stopped. It felt like an e-brake and the engineers got out and walked the train after. About 10 minutes later we started moving again. I’m glad I have my books (see my Amtrak packing list). We’re led by AMTK 817 (P42DC)⁴ followed by AMTK 146 (P42DC).⁵

This trains vibes are significantly less queer than our train out, which was the first after Pride weekend, but still pretty good. We’ve had good conductors (no Chris Lopez or Brad though, bummer). Our cafe attendant, Ms Jeffrey(? todo: fact check this) is super nice and funny.

From talking to our cafe guy Spiro on the way out and now Ms Jackie on this train, it seems like Amtrak has ditched all the fun tea flavors like Constant Comment and the fun fruity and lemony ones for just green and black, so maybe bring your own tea too.

Wednesday - delays delays delays #

In the mean time: I built a delay tracker

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1. Bernie the Dog link ↩︎

2. be nice though. email me ↩︎

3. A band-aid with the trans flag on it on my right thigh near my injection site ↩︎

4. I think ↩︎

5. See above ↩︎