July 22

I was kinda eager to leave, so I woke up a little early and by the time Meghan's alarm went off I was ready to get out of bed, and I would have except she started rubbing my belly and then moved her hand towards my tail and then I decided it would be okay to stay in bed a little while longer.

Since I wasn't going to have time to do it later, I joined her in the shower, and we had to hurry a little bit 'cause we'd spent more time than we should have in bed, but it was worth it.

We took turns brushing each other, then went downstairs for a quick breakfast, and she'd just finished the dishes when I heard her friend pull into the driveway.

Meghan kissed me and told me to have a good trip and said to call her when I got back, and I said that I would, then we kissed again and had to hurry out of the house so her friend didn't get mad.

The westbound Amtrak left earlier than the eastbound did, but I still had a little bit of time before the train arrived, so I didn't hurry right over to the train station. I had a nice, leisurely flight around downtown Kalamazoo instead, and then I went and played in a big park that was near the train station for a little bit. There was a pond that the creek went into, and then it disappeared underground at the other end, and there was a big grate to keep people out.

The ducks that were on the pond fit right through the grating, though, and they'd swim in and out of it, so I guess it didn't bother them any.

There was also a store called the Kalamazoo Beer Exchange, and if it had been open I would have bought some beer for Aric, but there wouldn't be enough time before my train arrived.

I was close enough to the station that I probably could have waited until I heard the train before I went back, but I risked missing it and there wasn't another train until tomorrow, so I went and got a cup of coffee from McDonald's and then sat outside on the benches and waited for it to arrive.

About ten minutes before it was supposed to arrive, a few other passengers started walking outside and sitting on the the benches or standing along the tracks to look for it, but I kept sitting until I heard it off in the distance, then I went up and stood by the yellow line, too.

There weren't a whole lot of people on the train, and so I could pick whatever seat I wanted. I'd always liked to pick the side that was next to Kalamazoo College, so I thought I'd do something different and pick the opposite side, which would give me a view that was mostly south.

I could keep good track of where we were until we got outside of Kalamazoo, and then it got a little bit trickier. The train went so quick, I was still puzzling over landmarks that were familiar enough from the air, and then they were gone. I think if I'd been able to look out the front of the train, it would have been easier, but I could only see things as they blurred past.

I was pretty sure that I saw the spot where the train went under the 94 Highway—the spot where I'd been watching it and nearly run into wires—'cause I couldn't remember any other places where there were two bridges side-by-side like that.

We raced through the countryside, and even though I'd been this way before on the train it looked a little bit different being on the other side.

I would have liked for the whole trip to be this fast, but the train got into a busy area and had to slow down, and just like on my last trip, there were lots of tracks on both sides with all sorts of trains on them. It was still hard to figure out what so many trains could be carrying.

After that it was nothing but houses and buildings and roads with occasional trees, and we mostly plodded along. Most of the time the cars on the highway that were right next to the tracks were faster than us, but then I saw a bunch of them slowing down and stopping, and then we went past a toll gate and got ahead again.

When the train finally stopped in the station it was nice to know that the first half of my journey was over. It had been nicer to be here with Aquamarine and Miss Parker and Mister Barrow, and I remembered how I'd been anticipating the rest of the trip and meeting up with Aquamarine and Gusty.

There wasn't anypony to meet up with this time, though. And I had five hours of free time before the next train arrived.

Well, I thought that the first thing I ought to do was have lunch, and then I thought I'd go out to the waterfront and walk around, and maybe visit a museum. So I ate at one of the snack kiosks which was called Au Bon Pain and had a hot vegetarian wrap, and then I went outside and the Willis Tower was right there and I thought about flying up to the top, just for fun. I wasn't sure that I was allowed to, although I thought that if I stayed close to it, I wouldn't have to worry about airplanes, and surely they weren't allowed to fly lower than the skyscratchers, anyway, or else they might bump into one.

If I'd been smarter, I would have done that before I had lunch, and maybe while not wearing my saddlebags, but I did it anyway, climbing up around the building in a tight helix. There were lots of offices inside, and there must have been people who noticed me, but I didn't stick in any one place long enough to be sure.

The air currents around the building were kind of tricky, especially as I got higher. There were lots of eddies and cross-currents, and I had to pay attention to avoid crashing into it by mistake.

I got up to the observation floor, which had the little glass boxes that stuck out, and I looped around that twice just so that everyone who didn't notice me on the first lap got a second chance, and then I headed down for the shore.

Cayenne had said that it was all pretty in the summer, and she was right. There was a big stretch of park with little walking paths and fountains and flowers, and I walked around it, thinking how strange it was that on one side there was a really big city, with tall skyscratchers and stretching so far that it took the train almost two hours to get from one end of it to the other, and on the other there was a big, open lake, and here in the middle was a nice park for everyone to enjoy.

I bet it was really pretty to sit in the park and watch the sun rise over the lake.

When I started getting hungry for dinner, I knew it was time to go back to the train station, and this time I didn't fly too high. The Willis Tower was a really good landmark, so I flew right to it and then the train station.

Their clock said that it was still an hour before my train left, so I went back to Au Bon Pain and had another vegetarian wrap, 'cause the first one had been so good.

When I went back down to the train shed, there wasn't an Amtrak waiting on my platform, but instead a brown and orange train called Iowa Pacific, and I asked the conductor if this was the train I was supposed to be on or if there was an Amtrak coming after he left.

He said that this was my train, and that I could get aboard if I wanted.

The inside was nicer than the Amtrak, and it had a car with a big glass dome, like the trains we'd taken out west, and I wanted to sit there but that was the dining car and I wasn't allowed to.

I wish I'd known that it had a dining car, 'cause I wouldn't have had dinner at the train station if I'd known.

I picked a seat on the lake side of the train in the hopes of getting a better view than just a highway.

Well, it wasn't really any better until we left Chicago, then it turned into fields and trees. This train didn't run as fast as the Amtrak did in Michigan.

I discovered that some of Indiana is very, very flat, which I guess makes it perfect for big fields, and there were a lot of them. The corn was high enough that sometimes all I could see out the window was cornstalks.

We passed by a big collection of silver silos—I'd seen some like them on farms before, but never a big collection all in one place like this. I figured it must be a place where the crop is stored before putting it onto a train.

Towards dusk, it started to get hillier, and I saw out the windows on the other side that there was a road that ran next to the track, and that was kind of neat because while the tracks went straight and level, the road went up and down, so sometimes the cars were a little above us and sometimes they were parallel and sometimes we were looking down on them.

The train started slowing down as we crossed a river, and pretty soon we arrived at the train station, which was in a river valley.

I looked at the directions that Aric had given me and they were pretty easy to follow. Right outside was Main Street, and I was supposed to follow that until I got to Kossuth Street, which was right after a zoo and baseball field.

I wasn't sure what a zoo would look like—I suppose it would have lots of different animals in it—but I knew what baseball fields looked like, so I flew up until I was clear of all the wires than ran overhead and started following Main Street away from the river.

The baseball field was really easy to spot, and he'd said that there were a couple of streets that didn't quite line up in an intersection and that the next one after that was Kossuth Street, and I'd turn east there, and then it was right on the corner of 28th Street.

It didn't take me very long to find. It was on a pretty big lot, with a square garage in the back and a big porch in front. I rang the doorbell, but all the lights were off so I didn't think anybody would answer, and no one did.

Just like he'd promised, the key was under the doormat, and I put it back after I let myself in.

My first stop after dropping my saddlebags was the bathroom, which took me a minute to find, and I might not have if the door hadn't been open.

I didn't want to go poking around, 'cause I knew that there were other people living there, too, but I couldn’t help but sniff around a little bit and try and get a sense of his house-mates. I thought about the picture he’d sent me and tried to guess who was who.

It didn't look like there were enough rooms upstairs for everyone who was living in the house, but then David and Angela lived in the basement at Aric's, so there were probably basement rooms in this house, too.

I sat at his desk long enough to write in my journal, and I kind of wanted to stay up until he got home, but I was pretty tired. So I got in his bed and it smelled just like him, and I curled up on the pillow and closed my eyes and even though the house was in a place where I'd never been before, my nose told me that it was familiar, and it didn't take too long to fall asleep.

Next Chapter: July 23 [Lafayette Civic Theatre] Estimated time remaining: 38 Hours, 56 Minutes