Thursday, January 14, 2010; 7:15am El Paso, Texas; We both slept fairly well if only for 5 hours. The feel of the train stopping brought my senses to alert. I opened the curtains and looked out the window and staring back was the industrial side of El Paso,TX gritty and uninviting. This is South Texas on the border with Juarez ,Mexico, two cities facing tough times from a variety of problems including the recession, NAFTA, drugs, gun smuggling and more. I'm feeling brave so I got up and wandered down to the dining car, while Bob decided 5 hours of sleep was absolutely not enough and grumbles as I slid out the door. Some days the dining car chemistry just didn't work and Thursday was one of those days. Not one of the 4 of us sitting together could come up with a conversation with enough general appeal to make us chat. Which was just as well as the lack of sleep had not left me very chipper...Sort of in a, “If your not setting coffee in front of me people are going to die!” kind of mood... Plus the man sitting next to me had some sort of interpersonal relationship with sheep and yelped, “Bah, bah, bah” several times during the meal. Oh god, I'd been seated next to a nut! We all looked deeply into our plates when these utterances repeatedly profused. Breakfast was introspective to say the least.
Breakfast over, Thank God!!, I grabbed a Tea-to-go for Bob and headed back to the compartment. Our compartment on this segment is much like the one we had on the Empire Builder with spacious berths, shower and toilet en suite. Bob is still complaining about the size of the hot tub though and I keep reminding him IT IS A TRAIN afterall, but he is not amused.
8:15 am and right on schedule the Sunset Limited pulled out of the El Paso station headed East for Alpine, San Antonio, Houston and on the following day, New Orleans. Shortly after leaving El Paso the terrain flattens out and runs to the far horizon bleak, empty and unbroken. A terrain so flat and desolate there isn't even dirt...just nothingness, but Texans would probably extol the virtue of it because it's: “nothing as far as the eye can see!”. Eventually grassland and cactus join the emptiness and after an hour more, we begin to see rolling hills, then mountains as we climb to Paisano Pass, the highest point on the Sunset Limited's route.
12:30pm, Leaving the mountains behind we pull onto the siding at Alpine, TX. Someone really had a very sick sense of humor when they named this town Alpine... Not a snow covered mountain or field of wild flowers in sight. In fact, not a single thing that would bring to mind an 'Alpine' setting...but, as before, “nothingness as far as the eye can see!” A better name might have been sans-Alpine. Joking aside, Alpine is the jumping off point for the Big Bend Ntl Park and a good place to explore the NPS and AMTRAK 'Trails and Rails' program. Also, Alpine is the mid-point on the Sunset limited line as we waited on the siding for Sunset Limited sister Train #1 to pass us. We had to make an emergency stop at Sanderson, TX as one of our passengers was sick. We heard the car attendant call the conductor to car 219 and then saw uniformed trainmen hustling past our cabin door to wherever that person was.located then the inevitable, “Is there a doctor or nurse on the train?” Then, we rolled into Sanderson station which was not a scheduled stop so passing an ambulance and police car we assumed they unloaded the person. As we sat in the station yard we looked around the town and immediately thought of the Twilight Zone show. There were buildings all around and streets that were lined with homes, cars parked in driveways and left derelict in yards or on nearby fields but there was not one human being walking around. This was a town set in the valley with not too tall mountains surrounding it and there were quite a few homes accounted for that were all lined up in row after row but... not a sole was walking to anything or from anything. There were a few cars driving through the town but... nobody was driving them or so it seemed. Soon the train started to move again so we assumed the sickened passenger was left on the station platform... in the Twilight Zone and would be taken care of by Rod Serling! We can only imagine how this passenger must feel stuck in a hospital miles away from anything familiar. We were just glad to get out of there as it was a bit eerie. Then we started to pick up speed so we felt we were 'back on track'... so-to-speak. Then the train slowed to a crawl and stopped. Oh, boy, we hoped we weren't heading back to Sanderson. Finally we were rolling again. The scenery through our cabin window was dull and boring yet it draws you into a trance even though there is only endless ranch land full of cactus, old telegraph lines, scrub grass and small stones that stretch far off into the horizon. It is a land fascinating in its vastness and monotony.
Soon ,we would began to pass terrain which would make even Sanderson seem cosmopolitan and endless vista of buttes, pointing to canyons, stretching to the horizon and back again. Every cow-boy movie cliche set image passes by our window. Shortly after sunset in that time of day when there is more darkness than daylight but not quite night yet, we cross over the Pecos river .. This breaks the terrain for a few fleeting moments, then as night falls we think we will soon be out of Texas... won't we???
Friday, January 15, Beaumont, TX 7:00am; Is this some cruel joke? Yes, gentle reader we are STILL in Texas...It is unbelievable, but will this state never end? We showered, headed down to the Dining Car and while chatting with our breakfast partners a man and his LSU sophomore grandson show us the exact point where we crossed from Texas to Louisiana. A quick scope of some license plates of cars sitting in drive-ways tells them we are, in fact, in their home state of Louisiana. Thank you Huey Long!
The discussion turns to whether what we see out of our window is a bayou or a swamp, the younger, an undergraduate in civil Engineering said it was a bayou, his grandfather said it was a swamp. Seems a bayou is deeper and moves more slowly but, to us these differences were completely philosophical... they were all swamps to us.
As the morning passes we are definitely in the bayou or swamp country of small hard-scrabble towns, trailer parks, shuttered businesses, refineries, highways on stilts. We passed over the first Mississippi delta around noon and were definitely in endless bayous, or whatever the hell they were, on both sides of the train. Bob has observed that there are a LOT of people in these United States who live in trailers...or used to. Plus, there doesn't seem to be much of a market for abandoned trailers... I'm sorry, I am politically incorrect, the correct term should be 'manufactured housing'... ie; trailers...
12:45, Schriever, LA our last stop before the 'Big Easy' slid behind us as we stared the approach to New Orleans. Wheat fields,. Sugar cane, swamp/bayou, in no particular order as we cross the parishes leading to New Orleans. Around 1:30pm we started passing refineries and huge industrial complexes, these stretch on an on until the skyline of the 'Big Easy' came into view. The only evidence of Katrina we saw was a forest knocked over about 20 miles out of New Orleans, a full half-hour ahead of schedule we roll into New Orleans Union Station, grab our bags and head off into the party capital of the Universe, New Orleans, Louisiana... Let the good times roll
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