We’re inside of a week before our planned departure for Europe, and we’re still not sure where we’re landing. That suits Carol and me just fine. We’ve had only one trip together where we had to be in a specific place at a specific time, and I could feel my shoulders scraping against the constraints […]

This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train is bound for glory,
Don’t carry nothing but the righteous and the holy.
This train is bound for glory, this train.

                                         –Woody Guthrie

    There’s two ways to look at the climate change issue from the observation car of a long-distance train:

1)    The planet is just too big for one species to destroy it on its own.

2)    What a horrible species we are to be able to destroy a planet this big all on our own.

   Fortunately, Carol and I were simply enjoying ourselves too much as we awoke to day 2 of our excursion from L.A. to Chicago to consider the prospects of global warming. Except maybe to smugly contemplate the smaller carbon footprint we were impressioning on the earth compared to planes and automobiles. We had bigger fish to fry, ecologically speaking.

The New York Times columnist Russell Baker once recalled going for a walk because he was stuck for an idea for a column due the next day. Someone threw a potato out of a window along the way, and it hit Baker in the head. Suddenly, he had his idea. As I recall from his memoir, he was never stuck again.

   Those who have stumbled upon this blog looking for practical travel tips and unique experiences to discover have, no doubt, been sorely disappointed. On the other hand those who’ve returned from trips and proudly answered the questions, “What did you see?” (“nothing”) or, “why did you go there? (“I don’t know”) have been richly rewarded.

I didn’t set my expectations too high, as I boarded Amtrak’s Empire Builder at Seattle’s King St. Station bound for Chicago. I’d already gotten an email informing me there’d be a one hour delay due to track work. Hey, that happens. Generally, you don’t learn of airline delays until shortly after you’ve already left for the airport, and you wait out what becomes rolling further delays from the comfort of a straight-backed gate seat, landscaped with squalling children and families traveling with a small petting zoo.

   Luxembourg is a country that is so small, when it came to naming its largest city, it wasn’t necessary to find a new name for it. They just named it Luxembourg, too. It’s like when they made that tiny little car and name it Le Car. Le Car simply wasn’t big enough to have a model name of its own, as if one would even fit on its rear panel. During my first day out and about in Luxembourg, I took a train to the farthest reaches of its border with Belgium. That took about an hour, during which it occurred to me that were I to become stranded in the middle of this country, I could still probably walk back to my hotel.

   Jackpot! The car I chose for my two and-a half-hour ride to Nice is packed with Indian families and their squally children. They appeared to all be related and committed to catching up on every minute aspect of their lives since birth. The squally kids were left to fend for themselves.

   This happy coincidence was made possible by the lack of a first class car on the train (my congressman shall hear of this!). No matter though, I had a blog to write. I had also been fortunate enough to choose the sun side of the train, but the layer of dust on the window was sufficiently thick to provide a natural sunshade. I got to work.

These are examples of my travel goals:

So far I have two objectives for the Spain part of my trip. I’ve done a ton of background reading for this leg, including Michener’s exhaustive and exhausting Iberia, Zoellner’s chapter on the AVE high-speed train from Barcelona to Madrid in his wonderfully researched Train, Jack Hitt’s mostly enjoyable memoir of his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. I’ve also digested a stomach churning account of the Spanish Inquisition, and browsed several other weighty tomes. After all this, here’s what I’ve come up to do in Spain: I want to find a good bowl of paella and an English edition of Jan Morris’s Spain. That’s it, you say? Bear with me, though. (I know that’s bearing a lot.)

 With last night’s “steak” still creating gridlock in my digestive system, I realized I’d have to make an effort to work up an appetite for my poulet grande by lunchtime. I might be in the home of the French popes, but Saturday is Saturday, and that’s my wash day. I also hoped doing a load in the common laundromat would provide some measure of exertion toward creating that much desired appetite for lunch. 

The 10:26 to…”

…Lyon. I think I may have seen the papal palace on the way out of Avignon today. I couldn’t help it, since stone walls and crenelated rooks and towers came into sight suddenly, and they filled the train window. At least now, though, I will be able to honestly answer “Yes,” when the inevitable question, “Well, did you even bother to try and see anything while you were there, for crying out loud?” is asked.