Trip Report: September 22 to October 19, 2003
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
Fall Colors Coast to Coast - by Land and Sea
THE ADIRONDACK, MONTREAL TO NEW YORK CITY
Montreal to New York City, October 7, 2003
After organizing our eleven pieces of luggage, there was very little time for sleep, but after being on Crystal Symphony for ten days, we were pretty well caught up on our rest. The Lido Breakfast was scheduled to begin at 630am, but when we arrived at 620am it was already in progress, under predawn low level lighting, in deference to the hangovers that some of us passengers might be experiencing after the numerous farewell parties last evening.
Crystal Cruises disembarkation is very different from what we have ever experienced before with other cruise lines. The usual drill is to grab a quick breakfast, vacate your cabin before 8am, and find someplace to sit in a public area until your assigned number, letter, or color is called on the PA system. Then you shuffle off the ship and onto the pier in a group of perhaps 200 passengers, look for your luggage in the pre-designated area, gather it together, and stand in line to go through customs (where they seize your apples and oranges), then immigration, where you are welcomed into Canada.
In this traditional system, the lines move slowly and you have to shuffle your luggage along with you, as if you were standing in a check in line at an airport. If you are so fortunate as to complete the formalities without being detained by the authorities for some minor infraction, such as not declaring your cigarettes, then there is usually a long walk through an warehouse style pier building before you reach the outdoors where you hope you will find a cab.
However, when boarding Crystal, your passport is kept by the reception desk. Ship's personnel then take the passports through an immigration pre-clearance procedure. You pick up your passport at the reception desk the day before disembarking. Passengers are assigned a disembarkation time and are asked to meet in a designated public area fifteen minutes prior, from which they go down the gangplank in small groups at the designated time. There are no noisy or garbled announcements made on the PA system, and you do not need to vacate your own cabin until fifteen minutes before your appointed time.
We were traveling independently; that is, there were no transfer arrangements made for us by the cruise line. Therefore we were permitted to disembark any time we wished, from between 545am when all of the luggage was scheduled to be organized on the pier, up until when the final group left at 10:30am. Our train was scheduled out of Montreal at 950am, and not being familiar with this routine, we elected to leave early at 745am. There were few passengers getting off at this time, so there was no confusion in the luggage area, a porter was readily available, and the customs and immigration lines were non-existent. The porter hauled our luggage out to the taxi line and loaded it into the next available cab. In ten minutes we were at Central Station. The cab driver unloaded our luggage and I found a red cap (in Montreal it is a actually a red shirt) who took our luggage directly to the baggage check counter. We checked two bags to our first stopover, New York Penn Station, and two bags through to Greenville, South Carolina, our next stop.
We were going to carry our backpacks and our portable office bags on the train, so we turned them over to the red shirt, who loaded them into the New York coach, leaving us unburdened while we waited for our train to board. The whole procedure, beginning with walking the gangplank to finally finding a seat at gate 19 in Central Station, took less than 45 minutes, and now we had one hour to wait for our boarding call for Amtrak's Adirondack, at 930am.
Montreal Central Station is a busy place, with VIA Rail Corridor trains coming and going from Toronto and Ottawa, VIA's Ocean and Chaleur from Halifax and Gaspe, Montreal Metro electric commuter trains, and the daily Amtrak train to New York. There is also a bus that connects with the Amtrak's Vermonter, the last remaining segment of the former overnight Montrealer. There is a continuous flow of foot traffic through the double level waiting room. The restaurants are full and the shops busy.
To just give you an idea of the variety of shops available to travelers here, I purchased a crossover cable for our laptops. Yesterday, I didn't even know what a crossover cable was, but my computer guru advised me by phone that this is what I needed to interconnect our laptops. There was a store right off the main waiting room that carried every sort of electronic marvel; Bureau En Gros, the Staples of French Canada. After several false starts, I actually found a French Canadian clerk who was able to understand my request in English!
This practical shopping experience was only one of many options. Along with various cafes and delis, there is a 24-hour McDonalds, a florist shop, a dentist and a doctor (both available for drop-ins), a large drugstore, a greeting card shop, a shoe repair shop, and a store that sells luggage. The station's many amenities make it popular with locals even if they aren't taking the train anywhere!
As a line began to form at Gate 19, an Amtrak conductor began examining our tickets and passing out customs declaration forms. I asked him what the other waiting area was, the area designated with yellow signs in French. He advised that it was a preboarding area, and that if we were senior citizens, we could wait there with the other seniors, the handicapped, and mothers with children, and be permitted to board first. What a great idea! There was even an escalator for these folks, whereas our line had to walk down a stairway to track level. We were glad that we had turned our luggage over to the red shirt, as lugging and clunking wheeled bags down a staircase is not our idea of how to start a trip.
Train announcements were made in French first, followed by an English translation. The Adirondack was finally called at 940am. All New York passengers were directed to the last Amfleet coach, which was labeled Business Class, but had no amenities, as there is no Business or First Class upgrade available on this train. We found seats in the center of the car, but our luggage was nowhere to be seen. Then the lights went off, and at a very inconvenient time, as all the passengers were attempting to stow their bags in the overhead racks and settle into their seats. In this underground station, the emergency lights barely gave off sufficient illumination to find your hand in front of your face. I felt that it was a definite safety hazard, but Amtrak passengers should be prepared for issues such as this, as our flashlights were in our backpacks, which we could not find..
We pulled out of Central Station on time, and still in the dark. As we emerged from the underground, the lights and ventilation were restored. We were lucky in this car, as the A/C was able to bring the temperature down to a comfortable 71 F. The next car was not so well off. This is where we found our luggage. The conductress helped us move it into our coach, where we set up our laptop workstations.
The route to New York passes within a few hundred yards of where "our" Crystal Symphony is still docked, awaiting the arrival of the next group of lucky passengers, who will be sailing away to New York tonight. We cast a last, wistful look at this remarkable ship. The St. Lawrence here is wide, shallow, and rocky. The Adirondack rattles across on a lengthy bridge, then across the St. Lawrence Seaway Canal. Montreal is the western-most city to which a seagoing ship can steam without traversing a canal.
The snack bar, which is the only amenity offered on this train, is opened briefly before it is forced to close when we stop at the US border. Those of you who are familiar with train travel in Europe know that border formalities are handled by onboard customs and immigration agents while the train races across the Continent at speeds up to 186 mph. Here at home, trains are stopped at the border for as long as it takes for US immigration agents to look at everybody's passport, for customs agents to collect their Declaration of Purchase cards, and ask whatever questions they wish to ask of us hapless passengers. Three polite uniformed agents came through the car, stopping to make extra queries when they encountered a resident of Saudi Arabia sitting in front of us, a non-English-speaking Chinese lady sitting behind us, and a young Asian with an electronic device that the agent did not recognize. She explained that it was a "Chinese radio". None of these passengers were removed, but at least two other travelers were paged to come to the baggage car and escorted off the train with all their luggage. We were stopped for over an hour while this procedure was executed.
TRAVEL TIP: Many of our clients question the need for a passport. They will often say, "But we once drove into Canada with just a driver's license." This may be true, but for some reason, passengers on public conveyances are scrutinized with more zeal than those crossing the border in automobiles. We heard one of the agents tell a passenger, "You aren't required to have a passport, but it is easier for us and for you if you do." This is not the first time we've seen people denied entrance to the US because their identification didn't pass muster. And going the other way, we've seen people denied entry to Canada for the same reason. So, particularly if you're interested in making a successful re-entry into the US after leaving it, we highly recommend taking your passport to Canada. Don't be turned away at the border.
Once the border patrol disembarked, our train began to roll. Of course, we won't have to roll very fast to cover 381 miles in ten hours and fifty minutes. Do the math. These old Amfleet don't ride very well and the faster we go, the harder it is to keep my fingers on the keys of the laptop. The roughest ride is along the Hudson River south of Albany, the route where Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint cruised smoothly on the 20th Century Limited in the Alfred Hitchcock film "North by Northwest'"
At Plattsburgh, New York, the track swings onto the western shore of Lake Champlain, and for the next two or three hours, the lake was visible off and on, along with the Green Mountains of Vermont to the East, and the Adirondack Mountains to the West. The landscape up here has not suffered under the heavy hand of development and seems to be as beautiful as it must have appeared to the Hudson River School landscape artists of the 19th Century.
We are held outside of Schenectady for a few minutes, apparently behind another Albany Shuffle, but depart Albany only ten minutes behind schedule. As we depart Rhinecliff, the sun is setting across the Hudson River. Unlike the Lakeshore Limited, our train today makes all of the stops between Albany and New York Penn. Even with the high speed running down the Hudson, we arrive into Penn Station over thirty minutes late.
There are no red caps on the platform, but we are able to get upstairs with the aid of the escalator. We retrieved our checked bags and found a red cap to assist us to the taxi line. Tonight, there was a line of cabs and no takers, so for the first time in New York City, we were able to get right into a taxi with no waiting. We have a meeting tomorrow at the St. Regis, which offered a $550.00 travel agents discounted rate, but we have booked the La Quinta Inn, a new budget hotel in Manhattan, at a AAA rate of $136.00. We could not have dinner on the Adirondack, as the snack car closes two hours before the train's arrival in New York, so we phoned ahead to make sure the hotel restaurant stayed open late, which it was, until 1130pm.
TRAVEL TIP: Manhattan hotels are quite expensive by US standards. The La Quinta Inn was reported to us by TravelAge West magazine as the latest and best budget hotel in Manhattan. It is an older hotel which has been cleaned up and rebranded. It has no dining room, the adjacent restaurant, Dao Wong, is Korean. In fact the entire neighborhood, just four blocks from Penn Station, is Korean. The hotel is barely adequate. The room A/C didn't work and Dao Wong's dinner menu is geared to the ethnic Korean immigrant. A cold Continental buffet breakfast is included in your room rate, and is filling. Until this year, we would have recommended the Hotel Pennsylvania, across the street from Penn Station, but agents in the field report that its quality has declined precipitously.
