We had gotten around on our own, except for Sunday, when we signed up for a tour. A swamp tour! Walking in the Barataria Preserve was cool, but boat rides are always fun. We went to the Pearl River, near the Mississippi border. Interesting tour with a great guide – he had lots of stories to tell about life in the swamp. It’s amazing to think about growing up with no electricity and living off of nature’s bounty. And there is a lot of bounty! We didn’t see any gators (it was too chilly for them) but we did see raccoons, nutria and some big water birds. It was peaceful out there. And it was good to help the tourism economy recover after not only Katrina but also the oil spill.
We had a last New Orleans lunch at Ignatius, in uptown, and then went to the New Orleans Museum of Art Sculpture Garden, in City Park. The post-Katrina tour that I took in March went through City Park, a part of the city I had never heard anything about – so I wanted to see more of it. The sculpture garden provided us an opportunity to see both some of the park and some art! There were a few sculptures by well-known names, but more by people with whom I wasn’t familiar – that made it all the more interesting! The setting was pretty and the arrangement was pleasing. We had so many choices of what to do with our last hours there, and I think we picked a winner!
Helen dropped me off at the end of the St. Charles line and went on to the airport. I took the trolley back and met Kristina at her gallery. We walked to Faubourg-Marigny, the hip, trendy neighborhood just east of the French Quarter, and met David, a Morocco RPCV in the stage after ours, for dinner; we then went on to a bar for some swing music. Another evening of great food and live music in New Orleans!
And I was up early the next day for a 7:05 departure – at the Amtrak station! I boarded the Crescent, which they advertise as going from “the big Easy to the big Apple.” I had felt anxious when Helen left and I started to think about the future, but relaxed once I got on the train, there was not much to do but relax and enjoy the next 30 hours! No sightseeing car, no Rails and Trails commentary. I chose not to be in a roomette – it then took most of last week to catch up on sleep, so maybe the roomette would have been worth it, but that’s okay. We crossed Lake Ponchartrain and went through bayou country. Mississippi seemed to be a state of green trees, lots of undergrowth, and trailer homes. Alabama looked similar, except that the area around Birmingham was very industrial.
We got to the Central Time/Eastern Time divide (i.e. the Georgia border) just as it was getting dark, passed through Atlanta, and hit the South Carolina border at lights out (10:00). I had two seats to myself for most of the day, and I finished a book I had started on the plane, started and finished another, and started another. I had lunch in the dining car and dinner in the café car; it seemed that most of the people on the trip had spent Thanksgiving with loved ones and seemed sad to be going back up north. I was in a deepish sleep when, around midnight, they woke me up and told me that someone would be occupying the seat next to me when we reached the next stop; I never really slept after that, but I did doze. Woke up in Virginia – in farm country, near the sites of some of the Civil War battles I’d just finished reading about. I breakfasted in the dining car and imagined the armies marching and digging in over the gently rolling terrain. And then the train hit the Northeast Corridor and traveled a route I’d taken many a time. Sometimes you get on those trains and you see people who seem to have been on the train all night – well, now I was one of those people. No more leaves on the trees. The Chesapeake, Boathouse Row, the swamps of Jersey – no tourist swamp boat tour here! - and on to Penn Station, New York. I’ve loved my train travel this year!
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