First Time Traveling on Our Own

I was 19 the first time I took a trip without my parents. No, it wasn't to head off to college. I went to a commuter college in my home town and remained at my parent's home throughout. My younger sister, Ruth, and I decided to take a trip to Chicago to vist our older sister, Deb. We had shingled the garage that summer so mom and dad were paying for the trip. There was an Amtrak station near our home so decided to go by train from St Louis to Chicago. We were inexperienced drivers then and didn't want to drive through a big city. But, there were no trains, ships or planes in our past. All of our family vacations were RV camping trips; so, neither of us had any idea what we were doing.

We were dropped off at the train station with our suitcases and made our way to the ticket window. The window had a thick pane of glass with one of those little circular holes with a metal grill over it. I walked up to the window and said, "we'd like two tickets to Union Station." The man behind the glass said, "where?" It was a bit noisy so I said, a bit louder, "Union Station" to which the man replied, "where?" I thought the glass must be impeding the sound so I said even louder, "Union Station." Then to my and my sister's surprise, he said, "there's more than one union station. which one?" There's more than one? I was a bit flustered but did reply, "Chicago" and received the tickets requested. For a man selling tickets all day, he could do better at communication. "Which city?" would be a much better response than "where?"