Kelly has provided more questions.
What is your favorite mode of transportation, regardless of destination?
The train, the train, the train. It’s civilized. I like the light rail in Charlotte, NC. But I LOVE it in San Diego. If Amtrak didn’t have to share the track with commercial vehicles, it’d be way better off. And if cities had spent more money over time with their mass transit – the NYC subway, and especially the T in Boston – it would be top-notch.
When I see stories about traveling out west to Great Basin Star Train, designed to see the stars sans light pollution, I say, “I would do that.”
One pipe dream involves going to a bunch of Major League ballparks by train, maybe Boston to New York (2), Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Miami and Tampa Bay. Then another route through the Midwest – Toronto to Cleveland, et al., and a third out west. I’ve gone to two games by train, from Poughkeepsie to the New York Yankees in 2018, and from San Diego to Anaheim to see the Angels back in the late 1980s.
I took the train when I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, and to take the JEOPARDY! test in Washington, DC a week later.
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Incidentally, I had planned to write something about the sesquicentennial of the birth of the transcontinental railroad on November 24, 1869. The heads of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads meet in Promontory, Utah, and drove a ceremonial last spike into a rail line that connects their railroads. This made transcontinental railroad travel possible for the first time in U.S. history.
Most of my treks from Albany, NY to Charlotte, NC were by train. This includes a trip just prior to my mother’s death. That post, BTW, is the post on this blog that has gotten the most comments, bar none.
And I LOVE train-themed songs.
How pessimistic are you about climate change? (I am DEEPLY pessimistic about it.)
We’re doomed. We’re already seeing the changes, with more severe weather as the annual average temperature keeps creeping upward. If I thought the government had a strategy for attacking the problem, I might be cautiously optimistic. Instead, the US pulls out of the Paris agreement, promotes the use of coal, eviscerates the Endangered Species Act, guts the Environmental Protection Agency.
Check out Former EPA head Gina McCarthy knows why climate change activists aren’t getting their message across.
