Books

Well, FWIW, my wife and I have already changed our thinking for the next trip (from that mentioned in the Ft. Lauderdale to Chicago blog entries)!

Our present thinking has the following up for consideration:

Using North American Rail Passes, we will fly to Toronto and visit with some relatives then take VIA's The Canadian to Vancouver (thee nights on the train).

• A wonderful trip and I am really very glad we did it. I would recommend travel by train to anyone (maybe with a few caveats)!
• All Amtrak personal encountered were polite, pleasant and helpful. Some more than others but none were "bad". To single three out who were particularly helpful: Faith, the ticket agent in D.C. who handled our upgrade; Paula, the car attendant from D.C. to Chicago and Leo the car attendant from D.C. to Ft. Lauderdale.
• Overall, the food was really quite good on board!
  

These three days made up the entire trip back home to Ft. Lauderdale.

Checkout time from the hotel on Wednesday (day 7) was at noon and we waited until the last minute! A cab ride to Union Station followed where we found the Metropolitan Lounge, checked in and stored our baggage.

During my visit to the Louisville N Scale Convention, which by the way was very well organized and  was a great experience, not only because the city is really worth visiting, I got to meet really interesting people, and  acquired some Knowledge, I took some pictures of the giant layout, of which I added some to the "Louisville Layout" folder in my album, these being only a sample of the good work presented in the Convention, at the following link

These three days were spent playing tourist with no activities even remotely related to trains! The weather was really quite good. A little rain on Monday but nothing to really cause any serious problems.

With this in mind this is not going to be a lengthy entry.

Note: This entry is being submitted from the Metropolitan Lounge in Chicago's Union Station, on our return trip! (First free WiFi connection since Washington on the outbound trip).

So like trees there must be a thousand ways to do ballast. So to add too all that is out there I present the way ballast is done on the J&J. Why?  Well a fellow club member up here in Maple Ridge BC asked me to to demonstrate how I use a particular product, which he now is stocking in his shop, to glue ballast. The product is Acrilex matt medium an artists product that happens to do a fine job on ballast. I did not invent this method it was recommended by the owner of another Model shop that is now gone.

Note: The first picture (train arriving in Ft. Lauderdale station) was not taken on this trip. Rather it was taken a little earlier when I went to the station to pick up the tickets. It was, however, made up identically.

This first entry is being started somewhere between Orlando and Jacksonville and we are currently in a holding pattern and something over 30 minutes behind schedule.

Back in February I made a blog entry entitled Rail Trip Vacations. Any Recommendations? The general consensus was that the western half of the U.S. provided the best scenery. Nothing too surprising there!

As poker gains its popularity among people, it has also been an issue if it is a form of gambling or not? Before we go on arguing whether it is a form of gamble or not, let us first describe gambling or to gamble for that matter, to gamble is to put out an amount of money to gain even more of what you initially shell out. It is done with a risk, not knowing if the money one shelled out would be gained back or be lost. It can also be a venture that one takes with the hopes of having more.