I woke up Friday with a hankering for a train ride. It would also be a good opportunity to shake-down my Christmas plan of taking the bus to Amtrak’s King St. Station, and then buying a ticket to wherever the next departure was headed. I hadn’t ridden Amtrak in more than thirty years, and I knew my comparisons to the sleek French railway system I’d ridden this past September would be both unfavorable and unfair. So I set my outlook on positive, threw a change of clothes into my daypack (“Mini-me”?) and took off into my next unknown.