I’ll see them in a few weeks.
We have the entire school year together.
I can write them and tell them all about it.
GAH.
Even Vi and Em were all “OH COOL! A CROSS-COUNTRY TRAIN TRIP! JEALOUS!”
But they have No. Idea.
Because now I need to explain what exactly Mimi writes. See, as a Fellow Author, I was totally curious how Mimi was going to incorporate “the culture of rail travel” into her writing. She’s talked forever about writing a novel, so I couldn’t wait to hear what she was going to come up with. But here’s the thing: Mimi’s kind of famous for her parenting blog. It’s a big deal, with thousands and thousands of followers, and pieces in all kinds of crazy places like Oprah’s magazine and the New York Times. She gets invited to speak at conferences and write for parenting magazines all the time. But the point—and the MAJOR problem here—is that the blog is all about our family. I mean allllllllll about our family. Here are some of her blog posts:
★ How I said “cumbercukes” instead of “cucumbers” when I was little, and “capause” instead of “because,” and how I used to sing the song from The Wizard of Oz: “Capause, capause, capause, capause, CAPAUSE! Capause of the wonderful things he does!”
★ How when Ladybug was first toilet trained, she had to sing a goodbye song to her poop before she’d let anyone flush the toilet.
★ How once when Laurel and I were fighting, I told her that I’d pull out her teeth while she was sleeping and put them under my pillow so I’d get money from the Tooth Fairy, and another time Laurel saved a snowball in the freezer until July so she could throw it at me.
★ How once I found these white fluffy pads in the bathroom and made them into sleeping mats for my dolls.
I mean EVERYTHING.
When I was little, I didn’t care, obviously, because…well, I was little. And of course Mimi doesn’t use our real names. She used nicknames based on our personalities. “Animal Planet” for Ladybug, because she was always obsessed with animals, “the Scribe” for me because I’ve always kept a diary or journal, and “the Activist” for Laurel. The last one is kind of funny—she called Laurel that because Laurel was always…and I mean always…trying to prove that something wasn’t fair. Of course now she really is an activist, forever fighting for environmental rights and stuff. And I’m still writing too, so I guess they were pretty good nicknames.
BUT THAT IS NOT THE POINT.
The point is, not only am I being pulled away from home right at the critical moment in our Reinvention Project when we stop planning and start actually crossing things off the list, but Mimi’s writing project is a continuation of her blog! She’s going to spend the whole time peering at us over her glasses, making notes on napkins and the backs of maps. And every time someone says something funny or stupid or interesting or anything, she’ll be writing it down, and if the book actually gets published, the entire world will be able to read about every single embarrassing, ridiculous, nonsensical moment of my life. And yeah, it’s not our names, but it’s not like it’s a secret. Let me tell you, I’m all for her dream of getting published, but I don’t really want to have every comment, argument, family moment, and inside joke shared worldwide.
I tried to explain all this to Em and Vi, but I don’t think they really get it. First of all, they were (understandably) totally bummed that I’m bailing on them right when we’re getting to the good part of the Reinvention Project. I told them to go ahead without me, and that I’d try to do some of it on the train, but I don’t know. Without us being all together, it seems pointless.
And they were kind of jealous, which, under the circumstances, is hilarious.
This is me trying to get them to understand:
SAANVI:
Wait! You’re going to be gone for a month! A WHOLE month? You’re leaving us??
(Note: Vi can always be counted on for a dramatic reaction. But in this case she is not wrong.)
EM:
(interrupting before Vi’s hysteria takes over) You’re going cross-country? That is so cool! Will you see New Orleans? And the Grand Canyon? LUCKY!
SARA:
Not lucky! It’s not just that we get a paid trip around the country. Mimi is writing about the trip, and it might be published as a book.
EM:
Oooh! That sounds cool. What kind of book? Will it be a mystery? Like Murder on the Orient Express? Or New Orleans Mourning? Or—
SARA:
(cutting her off, because Em is obsessed with mysteries) NO! Nothing like that. It’s nonfiction, about family travel.
SAANVI:
Like a guidebook?
EM:
Hmmm. I think it would be better if there were a murder.
SARA:
YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT! It’s going to be like her blog. She’ll be watching everything we do, quoting us, capturing the “moments when life gets real” and basically making our whole trip public! We’re going to be like…like a reality TV show! Only in a book! She wants us to have matching T-shirts!
SAANVI:
I could design you a team hat. That would be fun.
I don’t think they understand the scale of the problem.
Em was mostly bummed that I’m missing surf camp, and now she’ll be the only girl in the class. Saanvi was upset that now we weren’t going to be able to make over my room, which was going to be an extension of our Reinvention Project. My room bothers her almost as much as (okay, maybe more than) it bothers me. (Full disclosure: it’s still done in the unicorn theme I begged for when I was six. I have a unicorn mural on one wall, rainbow-unicorn framed “artwork” (though I use that word loosely) on the others, and rainbow shades on my window. Vi once said, unkindly but truthfully, that it looks like a rainbow fairy barfed in there. Anyway, now that project’s ruined too.
I was trying to explain to them how horrifyingly embarrassing it was going to be, all trapped together on the train with Mimi poking at us like specimens, when Saanvi asked, “Is it because of the whole…L-word thing?”
It’s not even the L-word thing. I mean, sure, it can be awkward introducing my moms, and sometimes people ask WAY too many questions. (I mean, seriously? Do I ask about how your parents had you??) But my family…well, I guess this journal will explain.
Sorry in advance, dear seventh-grade English teacher. Because I strongly suspect you will be getting the true and unfiltered version of the Johnston-Fischer Family Train Trip of a Lifetime…everything I WON’T be saying out loud.
Mimi can write her own story….This one is mine.
It’s official. We are on board. Goodbye, Shipton, Em, Vi, surf lessons, and our adorable cats, Amos and Boris, who are being fed by Fiona Dunphy and will probably poop in our shoes to show how much they miss us. Goodbye, space to get away from Mom and Mimi, who have practically killed each other fighting about luggage and who needed (or didn’t need) five pairs of shoes. Or space to get away from Ladybug, who has brought four stuffed animal cats and Bruce the Roman centurion. Or space of any kind, really.
And speaking of luggage, needless to say, Mom had one of her both-hands-up-in-the-air-are-you-crazy moments, and I had to put back around half of what I was planning to bring. My suitcase is tiny. Of course I insisted on my yoga mat, but I barely managed to fit my Latin book. At the last minute I decided to wrap the box of Vivid Life electric-blue hair dye in my new mandala T-shirt and hide it in the bottom. It was probably stupid to bring it, since it’s not like I’m going to use it, but I felt too sad leaving it behind. After all, Vi, Em, and I all did a semi-blood vow (like a blood vow, but with red food coloring on our fingertips because Em’s totally petrified of needles) that none of us would chicken out and we would all dye at least part of our hair. This was a tough one for me….I actually like my hair, unlike most other parts of how I look, which are fairly boring. My hair’s really long, and dark brown and shiny-silky. (At least when I’ve just brushed it. After a while it’s kind of a snarled m
ess.) But a fake-blood vow’s a fake-blood vow, so I’ll do it. I chose blue for the bottom few inches, Em chose magenta for a skunk stripe, and Vi decided to bleach two white streaks in her new short bob. I pointed out that she may look a bit like that 101 Dalmatians villain, but she didn’t care.
Anyway, I tried to bring some new Reinvention Sara—I mean Rae—clothes, which mostly means avoiding all the ratty (but oh-so-comfortable!) old T-shirts and bringing three new ones I bought on Etsy with my allowance. But really, what’s the point? Better to fill my whole suitcase with books. It’s not like the Reinvention Project has much of a chance, even if I manage to practice a few Latin verbs.
Trains, it turns out, are all about tiny. Tiny sinks, tiny spots to store luggage, tiny closets that basically fit one shoe. It’s cute, in a dollhouse-meets-Swiss-Army-knife way, though I’m not sure how we’re actually going to fit. The beds are bunks that fold out from the seats, which we learned when the super-jolly train worker guy came through and demonstrated. He was so proud, you would have thought he’d invented them. Then Root started asking him about fuel efficiency and high-speed rail options, and they were BFFs before he finally left.
Here’s the basic setup—me, the moms, and sometimes Ladybug are in one sleeper. Laurel, Root, and Ladybug the rest of the time are in another. Ladybug can’t decide if she’s willing to sleep away from the moms, but Laurel promised to tell her fairy stories every night, so Ladybug said she’d try. I hope she stays with them. Even three people in here is ridiculous. And Mimi snores, though she swears she doesn’t. Every time we tell her, she immediately straightens up and pretends to look offended, saying “There must have been a bullfrog in the room last night! I never snore!”
Today’s train ride is only as far as New York, so we won’t even be using the cool beds. We’ll spend the day in New York, then get back on the train tonight, which is when the real trip begins. The train leaving New York is called the Crescent Line. It travels to New Orleans. If we went straight through, it would take around thirty hours to get there. We’ll be taking over a week, getting off the train at different spots to “explore the sights and sounds and smells of our country!”
That last part is a direct quote from Mimi. She is very excited about all this, and especially excited to “get the real, the honest, the hilarious, and the hideous moments of togetherness on a train.” Personally, I think I could do without the smells of our country in the summer. The smells of our house are bad enough.
Anyway, first New York City. Then we go overnight to Greensboro, North Carolina, and will wake up there tomorrow, like magic. We’ll see.
I’ll be sharing what our National Rail guide calls FUN FACTS about the various places we’re seeing. Though I have to be honest…some of these are seriously not that fun. I guess it’s all a matter of opinion. I’ve also added my own not-so-fun facts about this trip. Don’t think the National Rail Guide will be publishing them any time soon.
Fun Fact!
New York’s Penn Station is the busiest rail station in the country.
Not-So-Fun Fact!
A homeless guy wearing a dress tried to bite Ladybug. In fairness she was saying “WOOF, DOGGY!” really loudly at the time, but of course she was talking to me, not him. Still, he couldn’t have known that.
A concern: Penn Station was only a “quick” four-hour ride. I have serious misgivings about all this. The train was fun for around twenty minutes, and then we all got bored. Mimi was writing, Mom was deep in some legal reading, and Ladybug and I played cards for around an hour until I realized that (1) I think I hate cards, and (2) Ladybug cheats TERRIBLY. When I accused her of looking at the hidden cards on the edge (we were playing Concentration), she started laughing like it was the best joke in the world. In the end she won five games and I won one. Mostly because I cheated too. The only good part is that Mimi didn’t bug us for our “thoughts and perspectives,” as she was busy typing, then deleting, something for the whole time.
I love this city! We visit cousins in New Jersey every year, and we’ll come in to see Broadway shows and visit museums, but this time we walked all around. In no particular order, here are examples of the awesomeness:
The High Line: This is an elevated park that used to be an old rail track and is now full of gardens and art and literally a bazillion (okay, not literally, but TONS of) tourists taking selfies and wedding photos and everything in the world. I think I heard seven different languages.
Soup dumplings: These Chinese pork-and-crabmeat dumplings filled with broth are DELICIOUS. If you don’t know that they’re full of broth and casually take a bite, they will explode all over you. Cue hysterical laughter when Laurel proceeded to do exactly that. Also, Ladybug told every single person who worked there or ate there that she was Chinese like the dumplings. So that wasn’t embarrassing at all.
Books of Wonder: This is a big bookstore filled floor-to-ceiling with children’s books, including tons of autographed ones. While we were in there looking around, I spotted at least two ACTUAL authors talking to the staff and signing books. Not sure I’d ever want to write for kids—I think I’d rather write real grown-up books—but if I did, I would totally want to see my books in this store.
NYU, or New York University: It’s right in the middle of everything and is definitely where I want to go to college. There were students everywhere, sketching, dancing, working on computers, hanging out. They were the coolest people I’ve ever seen.
One group of students was protesting offshore oil drilling, and Laurel and Root walked straight over and talked to them, and they all did this righteous fist-bumping thing and promised to follow each other on Instagram. It was all very hip and grown-up, and I admit I kind of wanted to jump in, but I was too embarrassed. Plus my sandals are leather and I was afraid if the protesters were vegan, they might get mad. Though I realized after we left that Laurel was wearing her “Piping Plover: Tastes Like Chicken” T-shirt, which means they couldn’t have been too uptight, since the shirt basically suggests we eat these endangered birds that are super-protected. Root hates that shirt, by the way. He thinks it’s cruel and exploitative to an endangered shorebird species. Laurel said she of course supports the birds, but the shirt is funny and, like Walt Whitman, she’s allowed to contradict herself. Root got quiet after that.
Of course with this group there’s always some drama. Root and Laurel tried to meet friends way up at the top of Central Park, but Root refused to take a taxi, even though we were far away and there was no easy subway connection. They tried to take a bus and got totally lost and wound up in Queens, which is, it turns out, across a bridge in a totally different part of the city. (It’s called a borough, by the way, and New York has five of them: Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Manhattan, which is the part I always think of as New York.) By the time they got back to the restaurant near the train station, they were forty-five minutes late and Mom was spitting mad, saying that Laurel couldn’t “maintain the basic premise of responsibility by showing up on time.”
When they came in, Laurel was drenched in sweat and refusing to speak to Root, who had been mildly traumatized by an angry woman on the bus. Apparently she didn’t appreciate his comments on recycling. Needless to say, hearing all this didn’t improve Mom’s mood.
She had her Judge Johnston voice going, which is never a good sign. “You realize we have a train to catch, right? This trip will not allow for the anarchist approach to time management that you seem to prefer!”
But Laurel, who—unlike me—is totally unfazed by the Judge Voice, waved her hands like she was brushing away a fly. “Mom. Please. The train isn’t for two hours. Let’s consider the worst-case scenario, shall we? Imagine this: you guys start eating dinner without us, and we—WAIT FOR IT!—have to get something else to eat! The horror!” She put her hands on either side of her face, pretending to be overcome with shock.
Mom is not a fan of sarcasm, so that was like waving a red flag in front of a bull, and she started in on a ram
page about responsibility and consideration for others and immaturity, which lasted until the chicken satay arrived.
MOVING ON.
Dinner was Thai food, which has the advantage of being something everyone’s willing to eat, and also awesome. Ladybug brought Bruce and posed him with the seriously fancy radish flowers next to the pad Thai. So far she’s taken photos of Bruce:
★ Standing on a soup dumpling
★ Next to a mural on the High Line
★ In front of a graffiti-covered parking garage
★ On the shoulder of a very patient police officer
★ Photo-bombing an Indian wedding (That one’s my favorite.)
You know, maybe this trip won’t be so bad. I mean, I miss my friends and all, but Mimi hasn’t been bugging us too much about “opening up and sharing perspectives,” at least so far. And it is pretty amazing to be out of Shipton and seeing the world. Somehow it’s easier to imagine reinventing myself in a place like New York.
Maybe this will work out after all.
I’m going to kill Mimi. No, really, I’m usually a nonviolent person, but this…this is ridiculous. Once we got on the train, she informed us that we should go to the dining car after we settled in, because she had a “delightful surprise.” Given that this trip was her most recent “delightful surprise” (and the arrival of Ladybug was another one—and yes, that worked out pretty well, but I wasn’t so thrilled at first, I can assure you), I was more than a little nervous. And with good reason. Her “surprise” turned out to be ANOTHER FAMILY OF NATIONAL RAIL FELLOWSHIP WINNERS.
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