2017 MinnWisMi - Empire Builder Heading West

Wednesday - October 18 - On the Empire Builder
Minot, North Dakota - sunrise at 8:15 while we were eating breakfast. This stop was long enough that we had about 20 minutes to walk after breakfast. Donna and fellow passenger, Cindy, did their best to get in at least a mile in that time while they talked about biking in Europe. Doug did not try to keep up.

Between Tagus and Blaisdell, North Dakota. There are hundreds of these ponds in this area.

What you can't see is that the wind is blowing at about 25 mph from the west. We don't think the train cares as much about headwinds as we would on the bikes.

Had a chance to talk to our neighbors across the aisle. One woman is from Australia and the other is from England. That's what we love about trains is that you get to meet and talk to so many different people.

This is how we could tell when we crossed state lines.

North Dakota - Montana state line and we are now in the Mountain Time Zone,

Matt and Noel, our lunch mates, have been on the train for a week. They are newlyweds and are getting ready to move from Los Angeles to Chicago. He works on trains as a porter and answered a bunch of questions we had about how things get done on passenger trains.

Nice to see some hills.

Just outside Bainville

The Milk River west of Glasgow

Havre stretch break. We were running 1 1/2 hours late so it wasn't as long as scheduled. It was a pleasant afternoon (4:30) and it seemed like everyone got off to get some fresh air. 

"Hands Across the Border"

Lots of selfies were taken in front of this big guy.

Jimmy is our sleeping car porter who took great care of all of us. He might be just a little worried that everyone is going to listen to the "All Board"

Looks like mountains and clouds are in our future.

We did get to see a little bit of a sunset as we were finishing dinner. Kudos to our waiter, Aaron. We hope he is still with us for breakfast after the train splits in Spokane.

No wifi on this train so all we could do for the blog was sort pictures. We are now a week behind, as any of you that have been following us already know. It was pretty dark when we went through Glacier National Park and Whitefish. We gave a long-distance wave to Lori, Cody and Abby in Kalispell as we left the station. We are going to bed in Mountain Time and they just announced that breakfast will be served starting at 5:30 tomorrow morning, which is an hour earlier than this morning. Hmmmm.