The train was supposed to arrive/depart Deming at 1:10 pm, but was of course late. We had been watching the train status on the Amtrak app because Silver City is about an hour away from Deming and the train “station” there is a gravel lot, so didn’t want to spend an excess amount of time waiting there in the cold. Brother-in-law Dale, who was not going on the trip to NOL, gave us the ride to the Deming, NM “station”. We arrived in at the Deming “station” with plenty of time to spare and were surprised to see quite a few people there. I had fully expected to be the only passengers there, but there were about 7 cars of folks there. Of course, as one would expect, some of them were waiting for passengers to disembark. I think we were the only passengers for the sleeper cars (there were 2; one for the Sunset Limited and the other for the Texas Eagle beings that we were traveling east towards San Antonio and I couldn’t tell how many got on the coach cars. Oh, I almost forgot to say, the westbound SLS/TE (train 1) got to Deming first before the eastbound one (train 2) did due to the lateness of the eastbound train. Train 1 is supposed to be around 3 pm and train 2 is supposed to be around 1 pm, but they were both around 3:30 pm with maybe 5 minutes between the two. So maybe that’s also why there were more people there than I expected.
The Deming “station” is pretty bad. It is supposed to be a gravel lot, I guess, but is so torn up, rutted, and muddy due to recent rains (not that New Mexicans will ever complain about rain), that it was sort of hard to walk in, much less to pull luggage on wheels. The Amtrak staff were great; they hauled up our luggage, asked us where we wanted each piece, and then put them there. They were also friendly and cheerful. The train arrived and left about 2 hours late, but we had kept ourselves up to date with the app, so we were ok with that.
That first evening, we had dinner in the dining car with a young man who was on the Texas Eagle sleeper. He informed us that both the TE sleeper and coach car(s?) were pretty full. The same was not true on our sleeper, maybe half full, but I can’t say that I did an actual count.
The food item on the train that sticks in my memory is the lemon cake. I didn’t think I would like it when I first read it on the menu, envisioning a dry cake/pastry, but it was quite good (and moist) and became my favorite train dessert/food item.
We were running late for most or all of the trip, arriving in New Orleans maybe 1 hour late, so maybe around 10:30 pm on Friday Jan 6. I didn’t take notes during this trip until now, a month later, so I have lost some of the details, but the lateness wasn’t egregious. We took a Lyft from the train station to our hotel, Hotel Monteleone, in the French Quarter. The Lyft ride cost about $11 to go not quite 2 miles.
The French quarter was noisy and crowded, especially Bourbon Street which after my first stroll down it, I decided to avoid as best I could due to the dueling highly amplified music from all directions and its associated air pressure waves on my body threatening to disrupt proper functioning. One thing that surprised me very much about the French Quarter was that the car traffic really catered to the pedestrians; they stopped for pedestrians whether or not they were jaywalking and proceeded slowly and cautiously.
We did our New Orleans trip things-a kayak trip in a nearby swamp before the Road Scholar week started, various museums including the WWII museum which is very large, very good, and (I found out) rather to very famous, the above-ground cemeteries, various lectures and music performances, the cooking school, the architectural lecture and tours of the Garden district, the wards with the “shotgun” houses, etc. Then we headed back to New Mexico Saturday morning Jan 14 on the Sunset Limited. The Hotel Monteleone had cabs stationed outside the hotel, so we decided to take one of those to the train station instead of hailing a Lyft due to the constrained parking and traffic. The cab cost about the same as the Lyft trip we took the week before going the other way. And then we took the Sunset Limited back to Deming, New Mexico.
On our return trip, we noticed some red, white, and blue bunting decorating a booth in the dining car. We asked a staff person about it, and she said that there was a VIP on board. The VIP was the oldest surviving person of the Pearl Harbor attack and was returning from New Orleans where some kind of non-profit group funded by some movie celebrity (can't remember who as I don't follow Hollywood stuff) had brought him and the other few survivors to go to the WWII museum in New Orleans. He celebrated his 105th birthday that week and WAS STILL WALKING (with a cane) ON THE TRAIN! I was so impressed. He did have Amtrak staff in front of him and behind him every time he was walking except for the one time he escaped from his daughter who was traveling with him and we saw him walk by our roomette without anyone else. The kicker of the whole story (IMO) is that my sister and I were at that same WWII museum the same time he and his group were, but I didn't know it at the time. When we were there at the museum, I did see a group of veterans (walkers, wheelchairs, etc) enter one of the exhibits and a man comes running in and asks "Are there members of the press still here?" I therefore took off to another exhibit because I didn't want any pictures inadvertently taken of me. But then when I met Mr. Joseph Eskanazi on the Sunset Limited, I realized that was the group.
I will tell you that the Amtrak staff took very good care of Mr. Eskanazi. He was very friendly and enjoyed talking to people, so we had several conversations with him and his daughter. They were traveling the whole route; from NOL to Los Angeles.
There were only 9 people on the Sunset sleeper, according to the attendant. It was the same cheery helpful fellow that we had going to NOL. When the train was coming into the Deming “station”, it was going pretty slowly with the brakes doing a slow squeal. We were waiting near the doors with the sleeper attendant and conductor who smiled at each other and gently chuckled at the slow stop. It seems that it was an engineer in training who was stopping the train and was being extra careful. The conductor explained to us that it isn’t so easy to get the disembarkment point for the cars to the correct place because the “platform” is a narrow 2-laned city (well, town) street. And it has to be done for each car that has disembarking passengers which in this case were 3 cars (I think, but maybe it was just 2) as the TE was part of the train also. There was a lady getting off our same sleeping car who had a billion or so pieces of large luggage. She had spent about a month in Texas with relatives who had recently moved from Deming to whatever town in Texas. Again, the attendant helped us and her with all the luggage. There were a lot of cars (ok, a lot in this context was maybe 10) in the gravel and mud pit of a parking lot, most of which were parked right at the entrance, partially blocking the exit/entrance into the lot. I was annoyed by that, but I suppose it was due to the bad state of the parking lot. As I previously mentioned, it was hard to roll luggage on that surface, so I supposed they were parking/waiting as close as they could to the disembarkation point for that reason. We could barely get out of the parking lot with our not-big car. I’m not sure if train 2 was late again which might account for the “many” cars there. And then we drove to Silver City where I spent the night before beginning a journey back to Albuquerque which, while eventful, will remain untold.
