At 9:15 P.M. on March 21, my wife and I boarded the Amtrak train, City of New Orleans, in Kankakee. Upon entering the train, we went to the dining car and had a late dinner. We learned quickly that the train made some serious wobbles upon the tracks; it wasn’t always a smooth ride.
Our roomette with sleeping bunks was about 42” wide x 84” long. Two comfortable seats faced each other that folded flat to make a lower bunk with a thin mattress. A top bunk was lowered with a 30” bed, which meant I only had 12” of width to shimmer 5’ up from the floor to my bed. When I slept, I hooked a mesh netting from my bed to the ceiling even though I thought it would be ridiculous for anyone to fall out of their bed.
My wife slept well, but I woke up many times. My bunk was about 14’ above the rails which meant every wobble of the train was very pronounced. I woke at one point and noticed I was rolling towards the edge of my bed. That is when I realized we were making a sharp turn and there was a real reason the sleeper car attendant warned me to make sure I hooked my safety netting while in the top bunk.
The train is not cheap; but it provides some great scenery. The 19-hour trip arrived in New Orleans at 3:30 and cost $700. The plane trip back was about $375. I enjoyed seeing the river bottom farm ground interspersed with cotton harvesters at daybreak as we traveled through Tennessee into northern Mississippi. I thoroughly enjoyed gazing out the windows of the sightseeing car as the train took us most of the way to the Mississippi River Delta.
New Orleans was much greener than our midwestern home from a day earlier. We wasted no time in gawking at elaborate homes in the garden district and taking advantage of a 5-day pass on the streetcar lines. We rode the St. Charles line, the oldest streetcar line in the United States, many times. A city tour took us to see the 9th ward, Jackson Park, mansions, cemeteries, the Super Dome and canals and levees.
Our haunted tour took us by an alleged vampire house, the St. Louis Cathedral, a restaurant with a table set for a ghost, a haunted pharmacy museum and Nicholas Cage’s old house, alleged to be the most haunted house in New Orleans. We also visited Lafitte’s Tavern/blacksmith shop, perhaps the oldest building in the U.S. to hold a tavern.
We walked the French Quarter and Bourbon street. We rode the paddle wheel steamer on the Mississippi River with the extra bonus of a great history and informational narration of the sites along the river. The channel has a depth of almost 250’ and its current sweeps over 400 million tons of sediment per year into the gulf. It was explained that the river is only ½-mile wide in New Orleans, much narrower than many areas hundreds of miles upriver.
An airboat ride in the freshwater swamps and bayous made me feel like Steve Irwin when we were accompanied by 8 alligators at one stop. I think their appearance may have been staged for our benefit; perhaps they were part of the alligator actor’s union in the interest of promoting tourism. The World War II Museum needs an article all its own; I finally saw a Higgins and PT boat in person.
We ate much of the local flavor: Boudin balls, gumbo, catfish, clams/oysters, po' boys, grits, shrimp, crawfish and of course, beignets. The real excitement of the trip came on the 3rd night when I told my wife I just I killed a cockroach. That meant that not only did we learn all about New Orleans, we also learned how to destroy cockroaches and their eggs.
Since the eggs of the American Cockroach, also known as palmetto bugs, needs 6-8 weeks to hatch I am dreading the middle of May. The fear of my wife finding one in our home makes me more anxious than fuel/fertilizer prices and the weather for my crops. I now know I should have hid the body and kept my mouth shut!
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