[title type="h5"]
Back to the Sunset Limited.
This is the second part of my diary of a four-train itinerary around the West, with stops in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago.
[/title]After what will surely prove to be my longest railroad adventure--a 10,000-mile odyssey in 1978--I took many rides of two or three thousand miles each, with the goal of traveling all the major Amtrak routes. A few years ago, I began to feel an urge to re-live the 1978 voyage. I had the whole thing booked and paid for in 2014, but I had to postpone it. This year, with much encouragement from my wife (unless I expected her to join me; she hates trains), I made the reservations, got the time off from the radio station, packed my bags, and set out on August 17 on a 7,500 trip.
It encloses the western two-thirds of America in a four-train, rectangular route in the West. It will almost certainly be the last such journey for me, leaving untraveled only the two Atlantic Coast routes between Boston, New York and Miami, and the Texas Eagle from Chicago to San Antonio. If I never get around to those, I will not be despondent. But I have been itching for a long time to take the northern part of the Coast Starlight and all of the Empire Builder.
My plans to get a lot of writing done on this trip have been frustrated by an unexpected, major Windows update. When I plugged in the computer early the morning, it began running a 154-item update. By the time we were on the road, it had gone through only 14 of these. By some miracle, the battery lasted all the way across the lake and kept the update running until I could plug in first at the first class waiting lounge, then in my roomette. After finishing the 154 updates, 41 more updates appeared. Another hour. We were in New Iberia before the computer finally finished its update.
Then I discovered that my personal settings for WordPerfect--the software I use for my writing. Another hour passed as I tried to get that fixed, but it was not to be. I would have to work around the problem for the duration.
I intentionally didn't bring anything to read, so much did I want to get my writing project going. But the frustration of the computer's issues had my brain in anything but a good mode for creativity. I have a few audiobooks on my smartphone, and returned to Beautiful Ruins, a very good novel I have been listening to for the past few weeks.
Lunch is a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich on sourdough bread, with a side salad I would see many more times before I returned home. Iceberg, baby carrots, grape tomatoes, Paul Newman's Own Italian dressing.
A drenching rain begins around Lake Charles and stays with us off and on into Texas. I take a nap at around four. Afterwards, I lower the top bunk to throw the bottom bed's mattress and pillow up there, so I can fold the bed up into seats. I push the bunk up, and my left index finger gets caught in the latch. It hurts badly, and shortly thereafter I see a dark red band across my fingernail. It will surely affect my ability to type. What's next? A train wreck? I get a cup of ice and stick my finger into it. Long as I'm getting that, I also ask for the rest of the recipe for a gin and tonic.
Dinner at six. This is a habit going back to the 1978 train ride. Breakfast at six, lunch at noon, dinner at six. Mealtime is the most looked-forward-to time on any long train journey. I am seated with a college athletic coach, his wife, and their pretty little girl. We fall into an entertaining banter. (One of the advantages of my line of work is that it makes for a good conversation starter.)
The entree (after a salad exactly like the one at lunch) is a steak of unknown cut with a brown sauce of onions and peppercorns. It is very good. Dessert is cheesecake that more resembles ice cream. We would have hung out longer, but the table is needed for the next batch of diners.
I may be fooling myself, but it seems to me that my crushed fingertip is better than it was a few hours ago. I decide that I will not die from this. I sit in my roomette and get a few pages of copy written for the Great Work. The first character to appear is a 104-year-old nun who, decades ago, experienced the Hollywood casting couch.
I listen to music–the only thing this laptop is adept at–and I fall asleep around ten-thirty. I am awakened a few hours later when the train comes to a dead halt for a couple of hours in San Antonio. I sleep deeply in the constant random motion and noise of the moving train, but silence wakes me up?
[title type="h5"]Tuesday, August 18, 2015.
Big Bend Country. Cows and Cowboys. [/title]
I awaken at around seven. We are west of Del Rio, but not quite to the Pecos River Gorge, over which the train seems to be in flight. This land is reminiscent of the most arid, rocky parts of Big Bend National Park, one of my favorite exotic environments. The park is about a hundred fifty miles from here. But as we roll on, the ground becomes greener and greener.
The only breakfast served on the westbound Sunset Limited is
this morning's. I am seated across from an enormously fat man who actually has traveled the entire Amtrak system, even the short routes. He was on the Texas Eagle from Chicago, on his way to Los Angeles. He adds that his itinerary is the longest of all the transcontinental lines from Chicago to the West Coast. He makes me wonder whether I am spouting too much detail in these journal entries.
The breakfast special is substantial: scrambled eggs, French toast, bacon, grits, coffee and orange juice. I wonder whether it will sustain me until lunchtime. It does. For lunch, I have a large vegetarian salad. It has much better greens than the standard salad from the previous meals.
I go downstairs and take a shower during our extended stop in El Paso. I have taken showers on a moving train many times, enough to make the point that I can. Now I can lave without worrying about the train's taking a lurch. Then, a nap. When I push the bunk up, I am very careful. I also note that while the finger that got stuck in the latch yesterday still feels funny, it looks better and doesn't hurt. That will be the last report on this potentially grave injury.
I planned to leaving the train for most of the fifty minutes it pends in Tucson, Arizona. I was going to meet up with The Boy (Mary Leigh's boyfriend, who is undergoing on special Army training after his ROTC college stint). The Tucson train station is surrounded by restaurants, bars, and shops, and I thought it would be fun to get together. But the train was stuck behind a few freight trains and is running almost an hour late. That will shrink the Tucson stop down to almost nothing. Oh, well.
Dinner is with a man who has such a distinctive look that I could swear we met on this very train a few years ago. He tells me id am wrong. He tells me his age, a lot older than he looks, which further convinces me that I met him, because I remember having this same feeling last time.
Dinner is almost as good as last night's pepper steak. This is an Indian-influenced rice-and-vegetable dish with grilled, marinated chicken. So far, the two best dishes I've ever had on Amtrak have been on this train.
I go to bed early, because I know what will happen before the crack of dawn.
[title type="h3"]Back To Part 1, Backstory: A Box Of Trains[/title]
[title type="h3"]To Part 3, Hanging Out In Los Angeles[/title]
[title type="h3"]To Part 4, Los Angeles to Seattle[/title]
[title type="h3"]To Part 5, Seattle to Chicago to New Orleans[/title]
