GBO trip: Day 1

Early this year, I had hopes of taking my wife on a longer vacation this year. Maybe a week long. My son lives in the Detroit area. We had talked about taking the car ferry across Lake Michigan, maybe seeing a Tigers game. Or maybe Milwaukee. Or Chicago. Or Duluth again (we were there in 2004). Or somewhere further west.

But when the work at my mom's house started, it quickly became clear that this is where we would spend most of the summer. We had to settle for two mini-vacations. The first was to the Twin Cities in June. The second started last Tuesday morning--about 120 to 150 miles away, driving south to Green Bay and Oshkosh, Wis. For a few days, the pressures of work and dealing with my mom's house got pushed to the back of our minds.

We did much of our packing Monday night and hit the road at about 9:15 a.m. Tuesday. Drove south into Wisconsin (only 10 miles away) and continued south and east, through forests, past farm fields and a string of little towns. Along the way, I noticed something I wanted to look at more closely on the trip home.

For a while we listened to the radio and talked. About an hour or so into the trip, my wife started getting drowsy. Then she was asleep. No surprise. During long drives (especially when the sun is shining), she gets sleepy. Despite all the turns, stop signs, hills, curves and a brief trip on the freeway, she didn't wake up until I came to a stop at her favorite fast food place. It was time for lunch, anyway.

Green Bay! Home of the Packers! We drove right past Lambeau Field on the way to our first official stop: the National Railroad Museum. If you don't know, I love trains and hadn't been there for nearly 20 years. So this year it was a priority.

One of the first exhibits showed a scale model of a train that deserves a little extra focus. It's called the Aerotrain ...


The Aerotrain was designed by General Motors in the early 1950s for American railroad companies increasingly concerned about a sharp drop in passenger traffic. It was designed to look streamlined--even a windshield! Definitely not like anything else on rails.

But due to the way it had been designed, the Aerotrain was doomed before it even went into service. (1) The engine was underpowered. (2) Even routine maintenance was difficult and time-consuming. (3) The aluminum passenger cars (which were based on a bus design) were anything but comfortable. Strike three!

In the end, the Aerotrain, dreamed up in hopes of getting people back into passenger trains, had the opposite effect. Here is more about the Aerotrain's life and death. Later, we saw a full-size Aerotrain in one of the Railroad Museum's shelters ...


We saw a display of "drumheads." These were illuminated signs placed on the rear car of a passenger train, as a little moving advertising ...


Nearby was a vintage ticket counter ...


After the exhibits, we were getting eager to see the "rolling stock." We went through the next door and found ourselves in a huge, climate-controlled room. There, we came face to face with Big Boy. Not the one you see hanging around restaurants, either. Here is a photo of Big Boy we had seen earlier ...


And here is the Big Boy at the museum ...


The Big Boy is a big boy, all right. One of the largest steam locomotives ever built. It was a 4-8-8-4, 133 feet (40.5 meters) in length. It and its tender weighed 1.2 million pounds (540 metric tons). The tender could carry 28 short tons (25 metric tons) of coal and 25,000 gallons (90 cubic meters) of water.

It was built in the 1940s and could travel at 80 mph. Imagine the power required to move such a massive engine and its cargo at such speeds! It was used mostly to carry freight quickly over the Rocky Mountains, playing a big role in the war effort.

Big Boy's drive wheels are 68 inches across. I'm just a few inches taller ...


And here is the cavernous engine cab of this huge locomotive ...

The engineer operated the controls from the far right of the cab. All the controls and knobs used to operate the engine are painted red. This was not an easy beast to master.

We saw other historic trains, too. This is the Dwight D. Eisenhower, named after the general who led Allied forces in Europe during World War II ...


This is NOT the engine used by Eisenhower's command train--but two of the attached passenger cars are from that train.

I could go on, but those are the most important trains in the hall. There are other trains and cars, both in the covered hall and in a nearby covered outdoor shed.

We got to go inside a dining car. Here is the kitchen on wheels ...


The dining area itself has two levels. Up a flight of steps, you could eat on the observation level. Here, all we can see is the inside of the building. But imagine passing through the Rocky Mountains in this car ...


We got to see a mail car ...


And we got to see this piece of Americana ...


The little red (or orange) caboose. Ever wonder what it's like inside? I got inside with my camera ...


And here is what it's like to ride in the upper level of the caboose ...


I didn't see a sleeping car--not one I could walk through, anyway. I've seem many of them in old movies, and I've always wondered just how cramped those berths were.

They had a train that carried you around the museum grounds. It was a slow train ride in a passenger car behind a diesel engine--not much more than that. But I liked the "rules of the road" ...


Once the visit ended (about 4 p.m.), I visited the gift shop. Normally a frugal person, I reverted to kid-in-a-candy-shop mode when I saw the videos and CDs. I would up buying one four-DVD set about steam trains plus two CDs of train sounds.

That may shock you until I tell you that I have more steam train DVDs and more train sound CDs at home that I indulge in occasionally. Sometimes the scream of steam locomotives lulls me to peaceful repose after a busy day.

We left the Railroad Museum about 10 minutes before it closed for the day. From there, we went to Best Buy to check out camera prices and then hit the road for our motel in Oshkosh. S had suggested that we stay at a different motel, but I opted for the Oshkosh Super 8. I had already reserved a queen-size bed in a room with a refrigerator and a microwave plus free wireless internet. Hey, I was all set.

But when I got to the room, I immediately noticed a few things: no refrigerator and no microwave. I hooked up the laptop to the internet--it connected, but I couldn't get online. What gives?

I complained to the desk, and then we went off to get something to eat. When we got back about an hour later, the room now had a refrigerator. Still no microwave. The internet was the way it was, and I was about to complain again ... when I finally got online.

I checked websites (mainly the weather) and watched TV for a little while, but we had just completed a busy day and we had another one ahead of us on Wednesday. So we went to bed.

That's when we noticed that our "queen-size" bed was just as wide as a double bed. Too late to do anything about it now. We had to get to bed ... and had something else on our minds before going to sleep.

(to be continued)