Winter Rail Trip - February 1, 2018 - Nashville to Washington, DC

View of US Capitol Dome from My Room at Hilton Garden Inn

Nashville to Washington, DC 

Let's just say it was a long 7 hour day spent mostly at my home airport Nashville International. Once in the air it was a short 1 1/2 hour flight to Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. My friend Russ B. picked me up and delivered me to the airport in Nashville for my 10:55 AM Southwest Airlines flight. Everything was A-OK all the way to boarding and even the door closed. Then flight attendant announced that some aircraft damage had to be repaired and might take a while so all of us on board should exit the aircraft taking all our carry-on luggage with us and wait in the gate area until further notice. Of course, the flight was updated as delayed twice before Southwest cancelled the flight and moved all our reservations and checked baggage to the 2:55 PM flight. They did give us a new boarding pass and a $100 voucher to be used on a future flight. Now I'm happy I decided to travel to DC two days before my rail trip begins. Here is an IPhone photo I took while waiting for the second flight in Nashville.

I arrived at Reagan National Airport in DC just before the scheduled arrival time of 5 PM and met my driver who got me to my hotel before 6 PM. It was already dark but I needed to validate my Metro Smart Card so that I could use it for getting around DC on the Metro so off I went to ride one stop to Union Station and ate a ham and cheese crepe in the Union Station food court. While there I took a few nighttime photos some of which I will share here. The Capitol Dome photo at the top of this blog post above is from my room at the Hilton Garden Inn. Here are the photos.

Union Station

Union Station

Liberty Bell in front of Union Station

The commuter rail in Maryland in DC area.

Tomorrow, Friday, will be a personal time day as I will be traveling to Alexandria across the Potomac to meet long time friends from Nashville who have lived in Alexandria many years for lunch and a time of catching up. Saturday, I travel on Amtrak's Capitol Limited Washington, DC. 4:05 PM to Chicago arriving Sunday morning scheduled for 9 AM. I will overnight in Chicago at the Doubletree The Wit hotel before continuing my Amtrak trip on the California Zephyr Monday.  

I plan to do my next blog update post from Chicago Sunday. 

Welcome New Subscribers 

I belong to a Facebook group Amtrak Fans. I shared with that group my Winter trip blog Wednesday and got 120 likes from members of that group(none of which are among my family and friends Facebook friends) and as of tonight 13 of you are new subscribers to my travel blog. WELCOME! I began this blog about three years ago as a way to let family and friends know when I updated my Reagan's Photo Galleries. Until then I had manually maintained and updated an email mailing list which was getting difficult to keep up to date as many people or email servers never let you know of changes. I began using Google's Feedburner which was okay but still a little difficult for me to properly code. I now use Feedblitz which lets the user subscribe and unsubscribe easily and will notify me if email bounces, etc. I hope you enjoy reading the blogs and checking out my photographs. Incidentally, some of the "as I travel" blogs are IPhone photos just to keep you up to date while I travel. My camera photos are posted to Reagan's Photo Galleries after I return home and then I post a wrap up post to let you know the galleries are ready for your viewing. You can view all my photos in Reagan's Photo Galleries and maybe you want to just check out my Rail Trips folder in the galleries. Just click on the links in this paragraph to check them out.

You can click on any of the small photos in this blog to open a full size photo. 

All my photos are available to view on Reagan's Photo Galleries website.