Strom Travel Diaries

Day 12 – Tuesday, December 28, 2021

It’s not easy to sleep in on a train. There are curtains, but they usually let in some light and that light will find its way directly onto your eyelids. People get off and on during the overnight stops. So Mom and I were both up and about pretty early. Of course, coming back East from the West coast, “early” can be a bit misleading!

We had rolled into San Antonio about 5 a.m. and were still there by the time Mom and I went up to breakfast. The train finally got back underway while we were eating (I finally tried the HUGE continental breakfast and was not disappointed!). It was a pretty uneventful morning, spent with word puzzles, reading, and watching the Texan landscape go by. We liked to try and spot different birds and try and figure out what they might be. At one point I saw a bald eagle! That one was pretty easy to ID. We saw egrets and herons just about any time we were near water during the whole trip, including when we went past some swampland after leaving Houston.

When we were in Houston, and again in NOLA, we came to a point where the train tracks merged and switched, so the conductor would have to go down one set of tracks and then back up and switch. And in a couple of instances on one leg the conductor had to hop out of the train and manually change the switch.

Despite being in San Antonio so early in the morning, it still took all day and most of the evening to get into New Orleans. Apparently, I was so riveted by things that I forgot to take many photos. When we were getting close to Lake Charles (still a ways to go to N’awlins), we started passing through a large refinery of some sort. And it just kept going. And going. And going. We hadn’t realized that Lake Charles was the site of a SASOL refinery and that the South African-based company was the 7^th largest in the world. You’d definitely get your 10,000 steps a day working there!

We finally rolled into New Orleans at about 10:40 p.m. The station was very Art Deco and beautiful murals decorated the top half of the walls in the main station area. We were able to get our bags pretty quickly and I got us a Lyft to our hotel. We were staying in the French Quarter (the edge of it, but it counts!) on Royal St. Even though traveling on a train is a lot of sitting around, we were still pretty pooped and knew we’d have a big day on Wednesday, so once we got up to our room we didn’t waste much time getting to bed.