Off to the City of Angels

 

    We had a wonderful time in Albuquerque visiting with Mary and Bryan but it’s time to hit the rails again towards our next stop — Los Angeles. After a couple days there we’re going to head due north on Amtrak’s Coastal Starlight. That will be another overnight run, this time to Portland, Oregon where my brother Dale will pick us up so we can spend a week with him and his family in Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River.

    This is the shortest overnight leg of the trip — just 17 hours and one-time zone change. We left ABQ around 4:30 p.m. and we’re due at Union Station in LA at 8 a.m. After two trips in the cramped confines of a roomette we’re riding in style tonight in what Amtrak refers to as a bedroom. We graduated from roughly 20 square feet of space to around 46, which, for comparison, equals about the same footprint as a sheet and a half of plywood. For anyone contemplating purchasing a tiny home, my advice would be to take an overnight trip on a train and then work up from there.

    The bedrooms are definitely roomier and they have a combination toilet and shower room in one corner vs previous sleeper cars where the toilet was either under a hidden hatch in the room or just down the hall. The “showerlet,” as I’ve taken to calling it is pretty tight quarters which isn’t all bad because you don’t have far to bounce off the walls when you're inside and the train hits a big bump. If only there was some way I could shave in there I could accomplish all the bathroom “S” tasks simultaneously in a space no larger than a stackable washer and dryer.

    As we turn west into the sunset, the glow on the mesas and mountains intensifies the bands of red and white and golden rocks, providing a new perspective on some places we’ve seen before. For much of the way the tracks parallel I40 which is the route we took over and back to see the Grand Canyon and Meteor Crater. Little by little more and more lights wink on in the tiny villages and ranches we pass. Eventually the landscape of barbed wire fences, grazing cattle, and dusty arroyos fades to black. Over on I40 truckers with the trailers aglow seem to keep pace with us from time to time on the flat level places — fellow travelers who for a brief moment become synchronized with us in time and space.

    Around 10 p.m. we make a brief stop in Flagstaff, Arizona before heading west again for a date with the bridge over the Colorado River near Needles, California. The town was made famous by cartoonist Charles Schultz who lived there for a time. In his comic strip “Peanuts,” he decided to make Needles the hometown of Snoopy’s brother Spike.

    Granted there are nearly four hundred river miles from the Canyon to Needles, as well as the massive Hoover Dam and Lake Mead in the middle, but you have to wonder if some the water molecules passing beneath the tracks tonight might have been in the river when we looked down on it from the rim of the Grand Canyon last week. They don’t necessarily have to follow a straight line downstream. Millions of molecules could have evaporated from the river in the hot, arid bottom of the canyon. Once in the atmosphere they can be carried great distances by high altitude winds, only to fall as rain just upstream of Needles and rejoin the river.

    It will be pitch dark when we get there but if I'm awake when we cross the bridge, I’ll give a nod of recognition just in case. It’s no farther fetched than a big-nosed dog with a bright red scarf and a flying doghouse doing aerial battles with Ace German pilots during World War I.

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