As expected, we woke up just on the eastern end of Kansas (which meant that the train was pretty close to on-time).  By about breakfast time, we were passing into Kansas City, Missouri, where the Amtrak station is.  Then the day was spent rolling through Missouri, a little piece of Iowa (look on a map—you’ll see that Iowa has a little tail sticking down between Missouri and Illinois), and then on across Illinois to Chicago.  This stage of the trip was pretty uneventful—what a nice surprise!

At lunch time, we ended up having a long conversation with the gentleman sitting across from us (whose name I have already forgotten) and the dining car attendant, the aforementioned Charles “Chuck” Jones, who is, it turns out, a candidate for his local city council in Wildomar City, a small town outside of Los Angeles.  His story was pretty interesting: he told us that there are three candidates for the post: himself, a Latino candidate, and a woman who is running as a write-in candidate because she “doesn’t like aspects of my life. ”  You can see what’s coming, even though this is California we’re talking about:  she doesn’t like that Chuck is, as he put it, a member of the LGBTQ community. 

Oy. 

You’d think people had better things to do and better things to worry about.  (To be fair: she probably doesn’t like that the other candidate is Latino any better: so far, there have only been white members of this city council.) 

What’s really great about the story is that the reason he got involved is that Chuck has just been through a two-year struggle with neighbors who have been harassing him, breaking into his home and stealing things, vandalizing his property, and so on.  Said “neighbors” were actually squatting on a property next door, stealing water and electricity from the city, and wreaking general havoc in the town.  When Chuck tried to get law enforcement involved, he found a very lukewarm reception (the landowner apparently doesn’t care that these heathens were squatting on his property and destroying everything in sight), and Chuck was actually told at one point, by a law enforcement official, that he should just move.

Oy. Again.

Instead of moving, Chuck waited until he had good information that these people were stealing water, and he called the water company, who, unlike law enforcement, really DID care about the theft, and they managed to get these people driven off the property and (one assumes) out of the town.  As a result of this experience, Chuck decided to run for city council.  You have to admire that—I don’t have the gumption to “do something about it” to that extent.  I hope he wins. I’m going to try to remember to check after November 8.

We rolled into Chicago late, but in plenty of time to catch the Capitol Limited, the overnight train into DC where, tomorrow, at last, we will catch the train to Richmond for our last leg home.