Early on in the trip, some guys in one of the back rooms on the lower level took all the ice from upstairs. Normally a Superliner sleeping car will have a cooler with ice in it that all the passengers in the sleepers can use for drinks. This cooler is usually located near the stairs on the upper level. These guys took all the ice to fill up their cooler. It wasn't really considerate of them, but I didn't mind. Sometimes you wind up with no ice in the car anyway for other reasons, and it takes a lot more than that to bother me. Later on our attendant got some more ice, but she complained that there was already a shortage of ice on the train and there wasn't much to go around. We all lived.

The two North Dakota guys were interesting to listen to, though. I thought they sounded like Norm MacDonald. They got on in Washington and got off at different stops in North Dakota. Like many people who use the "long-distance" trains, they didn't take an Amtrak train route from endpoint to endpoint. Although I enjoy doing just that (travelling from one end of a route to the other), I see many, many people at these dozens of stops in between getting on and off, at all hours day and night. People who say Amtrak is "running trains that nobody rides to cities nobody wants to travel between" are just wrong. I suggest they actually ride a train like the Zephyr or the Empire Builder to see this for themselves.

I had a few breakfasts in the dining car. As with the last trip, my meals were always with people I had not met before, and almost always these other people did not know one another either. The french toast was never bad. The first evening on the train I was still stuffed from my huge meal at the Ocean City restaurant in Seattle so I skipped dinner. The second evening I went for something simple from the snack bar. I chose an Italian sandwich that  I didn't think was very good. It was a packaged sandwich like from a vending machine or convenience store, cut diagonally in half. There weren't a lot of good options in the snack bar this time. The burger, which I had tried on my westbound EB trip and found to be pretty good, was not available. And I shuddered at the thought of the "bratwurst" again. (The "bratwurst" also had not been bad, but it was definitely something other than bratwurst. Could have been meat, could have been cake...)

On the train I met an interesting woman who was in the same sleeping car-- room 13, I think. She was at the beginning of a giant rail trip all over the country, starting from Seattle. She had not been on a train for several decades, and this was her first Amtrak trip. I was impressed with how prepared she was. She had compiled information from several sources, showing all the stops and little things to see at and between the stops. This information was organized into a little day planner binder that took half-sheets of printed material. The information was always sorted by the direction she would be travelling. When I asked her what she thought of Amtrak travel so far, she said she was really happy. I'll have to find out from her what she thought of the entire experience after she gets back home in April.

The Superliner sleeping cars have a shower on the lower level, near the toilets. When I try the shower, I usually do it in the early afternoon when there's no demand for it. On some of my trips there were people standing around in the morning waiting for the single shower, but on other trips (like this one) nobody else seems interested. Almost anything you do on a train is a little different from normal, and the shower certainly takes some getting used to. But it's always worth it and I end up feeling more or less like a human being again after a shower on the train.