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 ...

Dispatch XIX

The sky was big in Montana, just as its license plates say it should be as we skirted its western border and headed south to Wyoming. We rolled along a secondary highway past ranches and seas of grass waving in the crisp November air. Its was relaxing. Hours passed and the sun had set when we made it to the little town of Huelet. The hotel lobby was festooned with the heads of magnificent elk, bison and deer now no longer with us that ran up and around the big staircase that led to our room.

Dispatch XVIII

In full sunlight Medora looked as though it had been dropped whole from a Warner Bros. studio lot, with its one and two story clapboard buildings lined up against the raw mountain cliff behind it waiting for a gunslinger to emerge. The town boosted my fascination with the sanitized west I recalled as a kid. Being a boomer, my boyhood brain had been filled with shows like Gunsmoke, Maverick, Cheyenne, Wyatt Earp, Bonanza, the Lone Ranger.

Dispatch XVII

Who would have ever thought excitement and adventure would come to Sturgis, South Dakota? But today, is a beloved place in the American west, the motorcycle capital of the world where every summer the town of 7,000 morphs into a metropolis of more than 600,000 fun-loving, hard-drinking, hog-roaring bikers.

The Wild West rides again.

Dispatch XIV

The story behind Mount Rushmore isn’t what you think it is.

In 1924, historian Doane Robinson asked famed sculptor John Gutzon de la Mothe Borgum to create a series of monumental sculptures depicting great heroes of the American West. The project was to represent “not only the wild grandeur of its local geography but also the triumph of western civilization over that geography through its anthropomorphic representation.” The Lakota Sioux held a very different point of view…

Dispatch XIII

If you never heard of Wall Drug, a uniquely American place in the middle of nowhere that 2 million people a year visit, read on. And then learn about South Dakota’s Badlands, which look more like the moon than planet earth.

The eerie, terrible beauty of South Dakota’s Badlands. Last stop before we worked our way west to Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota.

Dispatch XII

The curious Corn Palace of South Dakota. We found it as we headed across the American Midwest into the Badlands of South Dakota and Mt. Rushmore.