Dispatch XXVI

We were excited about boarding the El Chepe Express. We had heard and read plenty about it. But getting our ticket and then getting on the train was work. It can be this way in Mexico. When we attempted to buy our tickets online while still in Baja, the El Chepe website was a disaster even though we followed every rule (in Spanish) to the letter (perhaps this was the problem?). Finally I called FerroMex, El Chepe’s rail company, and after many entanglements with our misaligned languages managed to get an email that proved we had paid for our tickets. But did we actually HAVE a ticket? I wasn’t sure.

Dispatch XXV

Sweeping west we saw some of the most arid country I’d ever come across. Even the cactus seem to shrivel. If you happen to be looking on Baja from a satellite, it would appear to be folded chocolate fudge, all dark swirls and humps and valleys; not a green thing in sight. We wound our way through it in less than two hours before bisecting a great mountain pass and then descending out of the desiccated plateau to the azure Sea of Cortez below, windswept with mountain/islands that seemed to erupt from the water, green to their caps. After hours of seeing nothing but dust and grit, it was like coming into Tolkien’s Valinor.

Dispatch XXIV

Another perfect San Diego morning. From Mission Beach we hop Lyft to the Mexican border. There Cyn and I climb out of the car and stand like a couple of waifs on the street corner and struggle to get our bearings. We find a sign: Border Crossing and follow with bags on our backs to revolving metal doors. Above us the simple massive word: MEXICO.

Beyond the doors we pass through a dark, vaguely sinister feeling hallway. Had I seen too many movies about nasty border guards in Spanish speaking countries? Arrive at a counter with plexiglass windows. Very standard. The moment we open our gringo mouths a slim, crisply dressed uniformed border guard pulls us aside, and sits us in a room nearby. Oh-oh.

Dispatch XXII

The morning was damp and gray. We left Monticello’s Grist Mill and the Maverick Gas Station behind to drive to Canyonlands National Park. It was important to see the sights there. On the way we needed to track down the place where Thelma and Louise had met their fate in the movie named for them, the one that launched Brad Pitt’s career and memorialized the last ecstatic moments of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. Miles and miles of flat, rocky plains surrounded us when we pulled off the main highway and snaked canyonward.

Dispatch XXI

Before Fraser, CO the Zephyr snaked into a six mile hole in the ground called Moffat Tunnel and for 10 minutes we disappeared into blackness. Half way into the tunnel, our conductor announced that we were as deep beneath the ground as anyone one on earth could be. Above us sat 2000 feet of solid rock. To create it engineers had blasted the tunnel right through the continental divide between 1923 and 1928. As we entered the tunnel all snow, rain, water, creeks and rivers tumble to the Platte and the Missouri Rivers onto the Mississippi and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. But on the other side, every drop of water flows to the Pacific.

Dispatch XX

Many of you have been kind enough to say thanks for the Dispatches I began sending the first day we bounced our bags down Smallman Street in Pittsburgh to catch the Amtrak train that began our 7-continent journey. We have, however, encountered a problem. I am way behind on those Dispatches. But I think I have a solution ...