May 1, 2021
An exciting trip!
I missed any chance to use wifi and post on Friday April 30 because I had a few things to do in the morning and an afternoon/evening trip to Michigan City, Indiana for the last day of street-running South Shore Line trains through the 11th Street Station. I only found out about this change earlier this week, that the station would close early 5/1 and be under construction for an estimated two-plus years, to make it a standard raised platform, not trains running through the street.
Thursday I went to a Target to see if the clearance camera I’d seen a while ago was still there — no — and didn’t want to buy one of the others full price, so I was worried I’d have no real camera to use, and my phone camera keeps filling up. Then I remembered I have a Nikon lent or given to me by a close photographer friend who just…quit talking to me years ago. I felt guilty I didn’t give the camera back, but they never asked…I dug it up, the 4 AA batteries it ran on worked, but I had to clear space on a card, a complicated, boring process involving having to clear video files I’d stashed on random cards because I can’t get my most recent external drive to work. It turned out my newer camera cards, 64GB, don’t even work in this older camera (???) but 8GB ones do, so that’s what I used. Anyway, by midday Friday I had this ready, plus my phone camera had room. I ran a short errand and read in a park with coffee because it was nice out, but didn’t feel I had time for wifi at the library. The South Shore Line has wifi, but I wasn’t sure if it was more reliable than Metra’s so I didn’t bother bringing the laptop along. I comfortably made it out to the CTA and on to my trip, which I won’t get into now because I’m making up for my missed visit with wifi at the Mount Prospect library and heading back soon. Will it work on Metra so I can post again? Also, now my laptop is slow and prone to not letting me even take screenshots because I stashed video files on it…
That was my first visit to Indiana in 2021, first South Shore Line train of 2021, first time in Michigan City in two years or so. It was worth 3 hours of travel (not counting CTA) for just two hours in town, and I got photos I liked, both on the phone and camera. I am grateful for recent donations so I could afford the transit (and one coffee and one beer there, and I packed my own food, mostly from free fridges/pantries). More later!
