10/99
Leaving Tuesday to return Saturday....
"I've got my bags all packed / I've got my ticket for the train...." It's done. I'm taking an Amtrak train, the Crescent, out to New Orleans Tuesday afternoon and will be returning Saturday afternoon. It was important that I get back in time for that costume wedding Halloween Sunday. It would have been nice to be able to spend more time, but I just realized I've been unemployed for two months already and have to get my ass in gear. It's now or never. And there's the money thing. <g>
By 11 a.m. I'd finished researching local hotels, reserved my tickets, made a hotel reservation, and booked myself a slot on the "Haunting House and Cemetery" tour. Yeah, I'm proud of my efficiency too (and thanking myself for buying that Fodor's guide five months ago that put all the phone numbers in my hands). I'll be in the French Quarter. The train tickets are coach but a sleeper was $444 one-way, and if I had that kind of money I'd be doing a far longer trip. I also wouldn't have to look for work.... The ride is a day and seven hours each way, so I'll be spending more time on the train than in the city, but I like trains anyway. It's far better than the 13-19 days round-trip by car my TripMaker software predicted. A road trip would be a blast and a source of much scenery, but I'd be broke by the end.
Let's just say they romanticized the trip a tad.
The Day
I took the bus to the subway to the train, so I left extra early Tuesday. Sometimes, hell will freeze over before a Queens bus will arrive. Knowing that I’d have to carry everything myself, I packed fairly lightly. Well, light for me. I brought my little backpack purse, laptop computer in its bag, and a duffel containing everything else. Train passengers are allowed two carry-on bags, and I didn’t feel like doing the baggage claim thing anyway.
Later, I found out I could have done two carry-ons and a pillow. If I’d known that...
One bus and three subway trains later (and a near-mishap that had the subway train sending me lurching over my bag, just managing to save myself from a nasty fall), I arrived at Penn Station two hours before my train would leave. I picked up and paid for my tickets at the window and spent the rest of the time in the Amtrak passenger waiting area, listening to some truly annoying classical music and bored out of my mind. It turns out that I really dislike Mercedes Lackey’s new novel, but it was one of only two books I brought with me for the long haul, so I was stuck with using it. Damn you, Lackey!
I do like the old-fashioned destination boards at Penn Station. A nice touch of working lower tech, plus it’s fun to watch the names and numbers flip at high speeds with cheerful clicking noises.
Five different Amtrak employees asked me where I was going through the last 20 feet to get on the train, but they ask everybody that. There was a group of freak kids in the car, but they were too cool to say hi, and I feel uncomfortable approaching groups. Since they spent most of the trip sleeping or smoking in the lounge, I didn’t miss much.
The trip would have been much more bearable if I could have slept too. I soon discovered the meaning of true boredom. Only five cars of the train were open for my exploration. I made handwritten journal entries at some point, but the occasional lurching of the train made it look like I was having seizures. For the ride down, I forgot to set the computer on Mute before I left home, so I didn’t set it up for fear of annoying my fellow passengers (it turned out that I had no real charge left on my battery too, somehow, but I found that out later). For some reason my head was killing me, so no music. The scenery consisted mostly of trees and abandoned factories.
I’ve decided that train travel isn’t for me. Cars are much better for traveling. When you drive you can stop and start where and whenever you want. Eat when you want, sleep when you want. If you see something on the side of the road you could just pull over for a visit. It leaves you open to finding things you didn’t know existed. With the train, I kept wanting to open the window to feel the sun on my hand or smell the breeze. I want fresh, not canned air. I want to be master of my own destiny instead of dependent on someone’s schedules. The train gives you no control. You move when the train goes. You stop at a few assigned stops that have nothing to do with what you want to do. You’re held apart from what’s outside; it doesn’t touch you.
We’re not even going to mention the hard seats in Coach.... Okay, we will, but just to say that I couldn’t sleep in them. I woke up at least once an hour. I started out reclining but spent most of the night lying across the two narrow seats (I’m so thankful I didn’t have someone sitting next to me at that point) with the hard divider poking into my ribs. When we stopped anywhere, orange light poured in through the windows. The way back was worse (even though I finally figured out how to use the curtains; the crew never told us), because I had a seatmate, so I had to just use my seat. I think I slept for 15 minutes that night.
Not that the sleeper cars looked much better from what I could see during my unauthorized ramblings through the train. Truthfully, I think I would have felt claustrophobic in them they were so small.
33 boring hours later... we reached New Orleans. I was afraid that there wouldn’t be any cabs at the terminal but told myself I was being silly. I wasn’t being silly. 9:15 p.m. in a city I didn’t know, and I was stranded waiting for a cab with about 10 other people. One guy grabbed the first cab that showed up 15 minutes later and asked if anyone else was going to the French Quarter and wanted to share a ride. I jumped for it. He ended up paying for my ride and said that if I got bored he was staying at such-and-such hotel. To my surprise, he was only the first much older man who came on to me during the vacation.
The Olivier House Hotel, the circa 1836 Creole guest house I stayed at, was an incredible place: old, strange, slightly seedy. It has 42 rooms, each done in a different jungle or antique style, that can be reached from a variety of nooks and hallways; even after wandering the place, I couldn’t find all of them. A spiral staircase blocked the top 1/4th of one doorway, so I had to bend to go through. Another spiral staircase leads to the dead end of a ceiling. Major parts of the hotel are open to the air; the balcony piece in front of the 4th floor penthouse suite had a view of the city and parts of the French Quarter that amazed me. The hotel also had two cottages around one courtyard, the one that had the pool. The other courtyard had a giant palm tree in the middle. The next morning I sat in the palm tree courtyard watching a salamander.
My lower-priced room had an antique look and its own small, street-side balcony. I reached the balcony by propping the window open with a stick and slithering under the maximum two feet of space separating the open window from the floor. I tried not to think of all the glass and wood crashing down on my head or midsection as I did so. But you couldn’t beat the view or all that cast-iron railing.
The first night, a loud party at the Hotel St. Marie across the street blared music until 2 a.m. I went to bed as a live band’s singer sang, "Don’t mess with my toot-toot." Second night, a drunken argument started at 3 a.m. and went on ‘til 6. The drunken woman involved had a piercing voice like a three-year-old with a head cold. People on the street were actually stopping in front of the hotel trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. The bed was hard as a rock anyway, and it wasn’t like I was in town to sleep.
I woke up Thursday, my single day in town, at 6:30 a.m. and hit the town at 7:30. It was a beautiful morning, clear and bright, with the mist making everything shine and lending an air of mystery. Jackson Square was nearly empty it was so early; later it would fill with Tarot card readers, mannequin performers, tourists, and bums. Had beignets at Café du Monde, open 24 hours, for breakfast (and later dinner too, because I didn't realize that so many places close at 4-6 p.m., leaving only the bars for food). Loved the beignets, though. One couple left me a free ticket to see one attraction called Madame John’s Legacy.
Passed time in the courtyard and then on my balcony before I went to my rendez-vous point for the Haunting tour. Our bus driver, Dennis, had Elvis’ ‘do and muttonchops, while the tour guide, actually named Adolphus Spines, insisted we call him "Mumbo." St. Louis #1 Cemetery was smaller than I expected, but ancient and interesting. Found out a lot. This is a town that gossips about you even when you’re dead. Got to see Marie Laveau’s tomb. The tour guide gave us everything from history to a description of the Superdome, an enclosed sports arena so large that it rains if they turn off the air conditioning. That’s how tall the place is.
Spent the rest of the day walking all around the French Quarter, checking out the sights and shops. You can buy a generic mask for $3.99, four for $9.99. I found the mask I'd already bought for Halloween in shops for $13 less, but that's okay because it wouldn't have survived the ride home anyway. A lot of shops just had touristy crap, but many had truly unique things.
The waiter at my Café du Monde dinner was sweet and flirty. Among other conversational things from Vincent: "You seem very New York somehow. I keep thinking I know you from a TV show. Seinfeld? Wait, have you ever seen Dr. Katz? Not that I'm saying you're a cartoon character." He started to say "see you around" until he realized he wouldn't. "Well, if you're ever back in New Orleans...."
As a New Yorker, I kept getting freaked out by the way people, waiters and shop people especially, looked at me. They focus on you like heat-seeking missiles. I found it intrusive and almost rude, but I know that’s just from being from a city where looking at people is considered invasive and can be grounds for someone pulling a knife on you.
All the locals were thrilled by the nicely hot but not sticky weather. To me, it felt like a second summer and kind of Floridian, different somehow from the Indian summer we’re having in New York. Disney has ruined things for me a bit, because the French Quarter felt like a bawdier Epcot village with better music and bums.
That night I watched two artists use spray paint to make psychedelic spacescape paintings. They used ordinary objects like cans and caps to make shapes and open flame to dry their work on the paper. They’d put a lighter flame to the can spray and create a geyser of fire. One just passed the fire over his work, while the other actually set the paint on fire. Yes, it was seeing flames at the corner of my eye that drew me to that part of the sidewalk. It was an interesting show.
Harrah's opened a new casino, so there were fireworks that night. Beautiful, and so loud they set off car alarms for three blocks. Boom! then the wailing of car alarms for the next three minutes. Then another Boom! and....
And yes, I did go to Bourbon Street that night, just to check it out. I didn't go into any of the bars, since consensus is that a young single woman walking into a Bourbon bar alone is "asking for it" but I enjoyed the street life. The crowd wandering the street, plastic cups of beer in hand, wasn’t as rowdy as I expected. You can see for blocks, and it looked like an endless river of gaudy neon under a gray-purple sky. Every bar had its doors open and live bands playing, so it sounded like someone’s nervous breakdown, a clash of sounds and musical styles that held only drums and thumping bass in common. Under those conditions, as you moved the music seemed to morph into something else.
Then there were all the strips clubs. Lots and lots of them. It was weird seeing the advertising pictures, featuring matter-of-fact nudity, for these places in plain view after living in Guiliani’s sanitized, Disneyfied New York. One club was named Big Daddy's Bottomless, Topless Tabletop Dancing. You also get to "wash your own girl." Another had "Cry, Little Sister" blasting out into the street. Don't remember its name, but "burlesque" was in the title. Had plastic strips over the entranceway instead of a door, like in a meat store. Red and black exterior color scheme. Not terribly subtle, I agree, but I doubt subtle was what they were going for. Interesting seeing all the women regarding the strip clubs with open curiosity and appraisal. Not all of the clubs featured "bottomless men" as well, so....
After surviving three hours of that drunken argument that night, I woke up at 5:30 a.m. so I could get my 7 a.m. train. Another 33 hours.... By then, I’d gotten so little sleep that I couldn't trust my mind. I mean, I had already started to hallucinate at times after the first sleepless night in coach. By the fourth day I was hearing things too. Think I got 15 hours of sleep in four days if you count naps. My mind would start to slide sideways on me. I’m still trying to catch up on sleep now.
Anyway, by the end I had a whole raft of odd conversations with strangers. Like Sabrina, an Atlanta businesswoman, who talked with me during a dinner in the dark on the train ride down. We were in the station, and the train turned off all power to do repairs. After trying to eat in near darkness, broken only by the far-off orange light bleeding in through the windows from the station, one of the Amtrak employees set up a glow stick for each of our tables. Thus, we ate under odd green light.
Other people I spoke to includes Jim (Midwestern man who was on the east coast only because he was being sued by someone who claimed he ran over him with his truck), Baron ("like the Red Baron") the flirting pick-up guy from Buffalo, Vincent at Café du Monde, unidentified guy at train lunch, Alabamans Gail and Jean at dinner, Crystal on leave from the Navy (with us comparing my brother’s Army boot camp experience to her Navy one. Consensus: each unnecessarily sadistic in its own, original way), some Ranger kid on leave who was put across from me and Crystal (The two bristled at one another for hours, though they were united in intense cigarette addiction and did a truce while smoking together. He didn't start well when he saw her Navy sweatshirt and asked, "Are you a seahead?"), a whole bunch of older women on the train ride home, a New Orleans waitress who was going to New York (whose name I never got over those 33 hours).... I didn't have to talk to any of these people, yet I did anyway. Even enjoyed some of it....
So I’d go to New Orleans again in a heartbeat. I just refuse to do it on an Amtrak train. Or ever go anywhere else on Amtrak, ever again.