Thursday, February 23, 2006

Amtrak - The Neglected Sunset Limited

Howdy sports fans,

G-daddy is back home, but I need to catch y'all up on the last 2/3 of the "desert trip 2006". First, the Amtrak Sunset Limited. OMG it fucking sucked @#!$ Here is a bit of an history lesson; Amtrak owns no rails therefore, every Union Pacific freight train and its Burlington Northern freight hauling cousin has the right of way on the rails. I have never seen sooo many freight trains in my life. I bet we were passed by four or five consecutive freight trains. All of Arizona and New Mexico was passing or getting passed by freight trains. In the middle of nowhere, the tracks are three wide with a pull over section. I swear it took 10 hours to go from Tucson to Demming AZ just a small piece down the rail. Then because of the delays, we were late getting into El Paso. The engineer just stops the train. RR engineers can only work continuous 12 hours max. I think airline pilots and truckers have this same restriction too. So, the dude stops the train in Willcox AZ and we have to wait till an new engineer is driven out from El Paso. Arrrgh.

We must have passed all of the cool desert scenery at night, cause I didn't see any during the day. The water color inspirations for G-daddy the artist, were limited at best. But if anyone ever gets to Willcox there is a very cute run down white house with a backdrop of the biggest, fullest, dark rich, evergreen trees. It is located across the tracks from the train stop (no station in Willcox). The "stop" is literally the section of track between the Dairy Queen and the Circle K store. The house has a corrugated roof with a wide rust streak, cause by the flue stack. The paint is faded and peeling with an almost light baby bluish teal trim. I think I'll try this one, on acrylic and larger than my normal post card fair. If that isn't lemonade I don't know what is?

The moral here is: If u wants to take the train; get a connex, pimp it out and make it comfy, then ship yourself as freight. You'll get there on time as freight, cause if you take Amtrak you'll be late. The train was twelve hours late. It was scheduled to arrive at San Antonio at 10pm and it arrived at 10am the next day. Pretty sad when the French, Germans and Japanese all have 100 mph screamers and we have Amtrak. Needless to say, I did experience the dining and lounge cars to the fullest extent. The dining car food was a plus.

Puter update, the trusty laptop is still suffering. I am waiting for an elegant solution via divine inspiration (perhaps a lightening bolt). However, I think I'm in love with Linux. The relationship is still young so I don't want to jinx it. Tomorrow's episode is San Antonio

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