Lost and Found, part 1

The Amtrak shuttle from Chicago got to Dearborn EARLY this morning. Greyhound’s scheduled arrival time was 11:30 PM, but the shuttle left later and took a different route, to accommodate the passengers originally scheduled on the Wolverine.

BTW, looking back at the earlier entries on this blog, I see that I thought Greyhound or Megabus were my only options out of Chicago – when I first tried building an itinerary on Amtrak’s site, it looked like the only Wolverine run available would have left Chicago for points east before the Texas Eagle was scheduled to arrive. However, Amtrak definitely planned for passengers continuing past Chicago to Detroit on an Amtrak train.

I did only start scheduling my trip last Sunday night (after calling my dad in the nursing home), so maybe there were no seats available at such short notice for the afternoon Wolverine train. Or maybe I was in such a hurry that I misread the schedule.

Anyway, the shuttle got to Dearborn after midnight. My sister’s partner Mary had planned to meet me at the Greyhound station in Ann Arbor at 11:30 PM. I’d texted her from Chicago and during the shuttle ride to update her on the change in plans. My last text, telling her we’d negotiated the Southfield interchange and were close to the Dearborn Amtrak station shows a timestamp of 12:10 AM – but that’s Central time, so for Mary the shuttle pulled up to the Amtrak station at 1:12 AM.

You might think my body was still on Central time – but after almost 40 hours of coach travel (sitting – I couldn’t have afforded a sleeper ticket), I was ready to sleep as soon as we got to Lisa and Mary’s house in Ferndale (near Woodward and 9 Mile). I remember Mary saying, “I hope you don’t find the futon too difficult to sleep on,” but that was the last thing I remembered until this morning.

I got up around 10 AM – Mary was already up, despite having been up much later than usual for her.

Did I mention that Mary had to take today off from her job to drive me up to Saginaw? No? Well, she did. I’m very grateful that she was willing and able to help – and did so very graciously, too.

I showered and changed into clean clothes, we had a quick breakfast, and I packed my dirty clothes into my suitcase. I grabbed my Big Bag O’Food, my laptop bag, my suitcase, and my camera…

Where’s my camera?

Maybe I left it in Mary’s car? I checked, and it wasn’t there.

There weren’t a lot of places in the house to check. I’d gone directly to the guest room with all my stuff when we got in earlier this morning, so there were only a few places it could possibly be – and it took just a couple of minutes to be sure it wasn’t in any of them.

I remembered having had it on the shuttle for the early part of the ride. I didn’t get off the shuttle at any stop before Dearborn – and I realized my camera hadn’t gotten off with me in Dearborn.

Hell’s bells! It’s gone for sure!

There’s only one thing I could do.

Call Passenger Services in Chicago and report that I’d lost my camera on the Chicago-Dearborn shuttle last night.

The camera’s surely lost for good, but what the hell – it can’t hurt to contact Passenger Services, right?

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