Tuesday, September 19th - Still on the train from Seattle to Los Angeles.

Dawn arrived about 7 a.m. and we gathered ourselves for breakfast. While eating we chatted with Lisa, who had just completed a 4-month kayaking trip up the Inland Passage of Alaska. She and her husband had paddled their way many hundreds of miles along the same stretch we had just covered in our floating 5-star hotel. I was fascinated to hear and see more about their trip, which of course was a very different experience than ours, and fortunately she said it would ultimately be posted on their Website, "wanderlust.net". She and her husband had some fantastic adventures and documented them with very nice pictures.

After breakfast we settled down to a day of watching the scenery roll by. Our train was repeatedly stopped on sidings waiting for oncoming freight trains to pass before we could continue, so we gradually fell more and more behind schedule. I was surprised at how brown and sere the hills were even north of San Francisco as I had always thought of that region as wetter and more verdant than southern California. I saw a large number of orchards with the trees in all stages of development, and I could only assume that the orchards were irrigated to keep the trees alive.

As we continued south the orchards gave way to extensive fields of vegetables. We had fun trying to guess what each field really was, based on what we could see. I'm not at all certain that we got it right, in fact, I'm reasonably certain we were often wrong. We were playing this game during dinner that evening, and looking at a field Monika guessed "carrots". Our waitress came by at just that moment and told us it was asparagus and judging by the furrows of piled up dirt that we had also seen on asparagus farms in Germany on Wanderung 5, she probably was correct.

My sister Phyllis, who dearly loved the bread pudding on the Zuiderdam, had mentioned her astonishment at another passenger who complained that the bread pudding didn't have enough raisins! I was reminded of that comment while reading the July 2006 issue of "International Travel News", where on page 33 a couple recounted their experiences on a Grand Voyage of 62 days on Holland America's ship Amsterdam. They had sailed from Seattle to Russia, Japan, Korea, China, Singapore, Australia, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii, and finally San Diego. They stated that, "The ship was beautiful. Our veranda stateroom was fine. The ports were stimulating. The seas were mostly kind. The weather was nearly perfect. The food was very good. Entertainment was varied." Looking at that travel itinerary and seeing how nice the ship was, I wondered what in the world could they could possibly complain about. They didn't mention a lack of raisins in the bread pudding, but they did complain that the other passengers were too old to suit them! They described the old people as "quite set in their ways", "pushy and rude", and even "belligerent". I couldn't escape the feeling that the pot might have been calling the kettle black, here, and it certainly struck me as odd to spend two months in the lap of luxury only to come back and complain about the other passengers. We did encounter an occasional pushy or rude person on the Zuiderdam as well as folks who bemoaned the lack of raisins in the bread pudding, but by and large people were quite pleasant and the entire experience one of luxurious travel to pleasant and exotic locales.

Our train stopped, dead, never to go again at midnight, possibly being related to Sleeping Beauty's pumpkin carriage, and as a result we were all rousted out and transferred to busses for the final leg of our trip to Los Angeles. I was a bit worried when our bus driver stopped at a police station to ask for directions, but we finally arrived in Los Angeles around 3 a.m, 6 hours late. The Los Angeles train station was really quite impressive, but we were way too tired to really appreciate it. Fortunately Chris picked us up shortly thereafter and drove us to his home in Long Beach where we collapsed into bed to get a few hours of much needed sleep.