days_unfolding

After a surprisingly good night's sleep, I woke up when the train stopped in Memphis. I lazed around until it was almost seven, when my alarm was going to go off. I originally had planned to take a shower on the train (there was a community one downstairs that I could use), but I decided that I didn't want to try a rolling and shaking shower. I refreshed my makeup and hair as best I could. At seven, the conductor announced "Rise and shine!" over the P.A. system, and issued the first call to breakfast. At that point, my mom had gotten up, so we went to breakfast. We had some excellent French Toast.

After breakfast, we sat in the observation car for a while. It had floor-to-ceiling windows, with some tables like the dining car and some chairs that faced the windows. We spent part of the time talking about other train trips that we could take, which amused me because we already were on one. (Be here now?) We looked out the windows, vegged out, and I wrote a little in my travel journal.

Because we slept through Southern Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee, during most of our waking hours, we rolled through Mississippi. It's very rural, with small towns and huge farms. (Mom commented that she could see why slavery took hold here because of the large farms.) The dirt was incredibly red. A building had a sign that said "Hotel Ponder," which is a poetic name for a hotel.

We went back to our roomette, and I dozed for a while. We had an excellent lunch (Mushroom Cannelloni). Someone tried to leave the dining car without having dessert, and the waiter asked if she wanted dessert, saying "We're going to do you good. We're not the airlines."

Around the time that we crossed into Louisiana, we started to see swamps. They had eerie trees that looked like large sticks with no leaves, just moss.

As we got closer to New Orleans, we saw a huge lake next to a causeway, which we thought was Lake Pontchartrain. Then we rolled through the New Orleans suburbs. Eventually we arrived at the New Orleans station.

After we disembarked from the train, the ground felt like it was still moving up and down. The effect lasted for at least a couple of hours. We walked outside to get from the train to the station. It was hot, but it didn't seen unbearably hot. We didn't have much problems with the heat while we were there.

We caught a cab to the hotel (Le Richelieu in the French Quarter). The cab driver had the meter turned off, and I was afraid that he was going to rip us off, but the price seemed fair. We checked into the hotel. I had booked a special summer rate that included one night free if you stayed at least three nights, and the desk clerk told us the night that we would have free, so I thought that our reservation was fine. The room was nice. A area with suites was nearby, and it looked like a outdoor patio.

Mom was thrilled to actually be in New Orleans, and she talked about extending our stay, but we didn't do anything about it at the time. We planned to stay in the French Quarter during the next day, so I called and made a reservation for dinner on a riverboat cruise. I asked Mom to make a reservation for brunch at Brennan's, which is a fancy restaurant that is famous for its three-course brunches. I insisted that I needed to take a shower before we went exploring, so I did.

When we left the hotel, it was raining, but it was warm rain. We decided to go to the Cafe Du Monde, which is a well-known coffee stand in the French Market. We wandered through the French Market, but most of the stalls were closing. We arrived at the Cafe Du Monde. Mom ordered coffee and I ordered Diet Coke (which would make a New Orleanian wince), and we ordered two orders of beignets (donuts with powdered sugar). We sat there and watched the world go by.

We found a restaurant (the French Market) that served crabmeat au gratin, which sounded good. (It was.) The restaurant had seating on a second-floor balcony. A restaurant across the street had a live jazz band, and we could hear it from our balcony. We relaxed and soaked in the sights and sounds. When we left, I insisted on taking the leftover crab with us, thinking that we would eat it later. (We never did. It just sat in the refrigerator stinking the place up. Oh well.) We wandered back to the hotel and crashed out.

Click pictures to expand.

Jackson is the largest city in Mississippi at which we stopped.