Training Ride (USA Day 147)
Despite the pleas of Jim, the internet and random strangers as we passed, we’d decided to cycle the forty miles back from Orange to Union Station in L.A. in order to catch our train. Our leaving had been delayed by a beer-and-popcorn-with-the-Sunday-football moment, which in all honesty had been a little longer than a moment, and the fact that forty hot miles of urban sprawl lay between us and our Amtrak while right here was a pool, a fridge and a widescreen TV.
Jim had taken it upon himself (and far be it from us to stop him) to do a full service of our bikes. We helped as much as he’d let us, but his vast well of kindness was bottomless and we’d actually woken that morning to find him repainting some of the scratches on our paintwork. He said it brought him joy. It certainly brought us joy – the bikes are running great!
Jim and Pam are riding the TransAm next year, as I mentioned. I hope that somebody shows them the kindness they showed us, because we left for the station with full hearts, full bellies and full panniers.
Ahead of a two-day train journey with no showers available, the idea of avoiding overt sweating was more pressing than usual. The city heat peaked at 90 degrees (Fahrenheit, obvs), so we failed at that, but kept cool heads in the main. The roads were unremarkable but safe enough, and wonderfully direct, so despite our anxieties about missing the train, we rolled through an imperceptible city limit and into neighbourhoods that started calling themselves Los Angeles with hours to spend. The light dwindled, evening began and we found ourselves riding through a gorgeous Californian evening, all greys and pinks and blinking lights. We passed a square filled up with Hispanic couples learning to dance beneath a stage of musicians, then crossed the almost-dry L.A. river hidden in its empty storm drain which surely only gets used to film car-race scenes from Grease.
The train station was tiny, for such a huge city, but we’re still used to the functional rail system in Britain. From arrival to boarding (and then long after) we discovered that the only accurate word to describe American train travel is the absolute opposite: dysfunctional. Check-in was weird and loud.
“I can’t check in any luggage Sir unless you tell me right now if you have any luggage to check in. Otherwise it isn’t going on the train Sir.”
I was waiting for a break in the woman’s rant to announce that I would in fact like to check in some luggage.
“This is your opportunity to check in luggage. Sir, you gotta tell me right now.”
In the window next to us, a man with his microphone turned up far too loud was shouting at a woman that she couldn’t change her seat. Behind us, a balding man in a Hawaiian shirt was trying to skip each queue in turn to book a ticket, approaching each manned-window whether they were occupied or not, each time being rebuffed to the queue. “It’s all pretty basic,” he kept repeating. “It’s all pretty basic.”
The only open men’s toilet in the entire station had three cubicles and a hefty queue. The time I was there (about half an hour), one cubicle never opened. One did, a man emerging sheepishly and slipping away before each member of the queue tried to stomach what he’d left: a stinking mystery, with the entire cubicle, toilet and all, covered in a single layer of toilet paper. We each had a look and decided that no, the last cubicle was for us. This also posed quite the problem: somebody had left a whole outfit in there, including shoes. We collectively wondered who’d walked home naked, and why.
The train itself was pretty good, with masses of leg room and a friendly conductor. As we steamed off into the blackness of Arizona, I felt a thrill of excitement that from here on in, our adventure would be entirely unplanned. But what can go wrong? It’s all pretty basic.