All Aboard (USA Days 148 & 149)

The minutes, hours and days about our train blended into a big Amtrakky mush of waking, sleeping, eating, stretching and waiting. It would be impossible to recount the events of those two days in chronological order because they didn’t happen in that order, rather a web of events and non-events that displayed themselves in locations between Los Angeles and New Orleans.

The nights aboard our train were snug enough, nestled deep in our sleeping bags upon fully-reclined chairs, though the heavily-jowled man behind us made the most horrendous noises, not even close to snoring, sort of halfway between sounding like he was having a really bad time and a really good time. These bouts of grunting and moaning weren’t limited to nights: he was a big sleeper, I’ll tell you.

Also aboard our carriage were two quite adorable little girls with their great- and great-great-grandmothers, who spent much of their time either ignoring the children or announcing punishments, none of which ever came to fruition. The conductor came round every so often to offer them meals (had they paid extra for this privilege?), a chaotic and confusing event that we began to look forward to as the journey progressed.

“OK, you got two options,” began the young conductor, in his brash loud accent that sounded part New York, part New Mexico. “Option number A, that’s a hot dog. You get a hot dog with the fries and the green beans. That’s option A, OK? Hot dog. Option number B is the rigolotoni. Rigaroni. It’s vegan, but I never knew nothin’ about that. Could be a meat sauce, for all I can tell. You got your rigatoni, you got your sauce, and there’s bread coming with that one. Number A or number B.”

“Do you have mac and cheese?” asked the either single- or double-great-grandmother.

“That was not one of your two options. Now I can get you some pasta. That’s option number B, the rigaloni. That’s a sort of pasta. I can do the pasta for you but it won’t be the macaroni cheese. I gotta tell you that. It’s not gonna be the mac or the cheese with that one.”

In front of us, two military veterans had found each other, one more talkative than the other. The one leaning over the other’s seat was full of stories, mostly about drinking, none of which were heroic or admirable. The quieter one came round the train at one point offering us all crackers and cheeze-whiz. The latter is a sort of dairy silly-string that can be fired at flat edible object for the sake of succour. Delicious it wasn’t, but comforting it certainly was, in the way it oozed out from its can.

We stopped for ‘smoke breaks’ (how the conductor announced them) in Tuscon, San Antonio, Houston and various other cities, the stations of which resembled the kinds of things you’d find in tiny English villages. America really doesn’t like its trains. In one (San Antonio, maybe?), The Burrito Lady waited on the platform with little foil-wrapped goodies for sale. We had the ‘meat’ option, which was essentially potato with a beefy smell inside a bread tube. Don’t be too jealous.

The desert was undeniably beautiful. The cactuses were my favourite: big knuckled gloves of plants with fingers reaching up in all directions. For a full day, for a good thousand miles, we sped through hot scrub and sand. I can’t imagine how tough on the head the Southern Tier would be. Fair play to those who’ve cycled this route.

I noticed that as we shuffled past a fence, the houses on the other side looked a little more run-down than usual. Garbage lay in great heaps between houses, and a couple of gaunt horses clopped away on dry dirt. This, it turns out, was Mexico. The fence, it turns out, was The Wall. After a mile or so, as a hill began, the wall just ended. It would take as much effort to walk around it as to find the sliding door to a large Tesco. There’s a lot of border. Not so much wall.

We kept ourselves fed on the usual train snacks: cauliflower, chocolate mints and leftover fried chicken. Really, who could go a single train ride without those staples? For entertainment we had another of our favourite escape rooms, this time train-themed, which kept us scratching our beards for much longer than I’m willing to admit.

Around midday on the second day, talk spread that we were running late. This was confirmed later in the evening when we ran late. New Orleans waited patiently while we pootled along at Amtrak pace, waiting for bunnies to cross the line and forgetting which way was East, presumably. By the time we reached the station, a full fifty two hours after boarding the train and a good five hours late, the clock had struck quarter to three and we still had a cycle ride through the New Orleans night to negotiate.

It felt amazing to climb back onto the bikes after two days of much more sedentary sitting. The night felt hot and humid, the roads unfamiliar and empty, the city ambivalent. Cue the start of the final chapter of our six-month tour.