Greetings Dear Readers:
The next few posts are going to revolve around a theme: that of our Spring Break trip to New Orleans. The first step in our epic Big Easy adventure was taking the train from Los Angeles to New Orleans.
Now, both Jo and I have been on trains in foreign countries (Kenya, Scandinavia, Korea etc…) but never here in the states. The trip takes 48 hours and we decided to skip the extravagance of a sleeper car and ride coach the whole way. The seats were huge and there was plenty of leg room but it was a tad uncomfortable to sleep two nights in a row in a semi-reclined position. We’ll definitely spring for a sleeper car next time.
A majority of our time was spent in the observation car simply watching the countryside roll by and pretending to read our books. We played cards and bananagrams, drank coffee, ate bagels and peanut butter, and took a lot of pictures.
Our day on the train began in El Paso, Texas. It was interesting because we could see the big brown fence that marks the border between El Paso and Juarez. The rest of the day was spent crawling across the vast expanse of Texas. We had a nice dinner in the diner car with a retired Air Force Chaplain and his wife. It was a decent meal and a lot of fun to meet a new people.
I think the most interesting thing about taking Amtrak is the obvious level of unhappiness amongst the employees. They were never outright rude to the passengers, but they were obviously surly and often told the passengers that “they don’t listen to us, so please complain.”
We would definitely take the train again and we got in to New Orleans right on time and got to see a lot of the lower half of the United States.
More to come!
