We're in the Big Easy. A bite to eat and a shower are in order.
We arrived in New Orleans. For the first time since we boarded the City of new Orleans, we were ahead of time. We arrived 41 minutes early. As we neared the outskirts of the city I heard the engineer on train 58, the northbound “City of New Orleans” tell our engineer that there was a tree laying on the tracks ahead of him. He then told him that it was just some of the top branches and that “He had run over them and had no problems.”
As we came into the city we saw lots of blue tarps on roofs. Several homes had trailers in the front yard and you could see where the sewer and other utilities had been extended to meet the existing systems. Lots of homes still had junk piled up in front of the houses. In the downtown area you don’t usually see it immediately. You might see a building that has a window boarded up, or a business that is closed, but when you look around and put them all together, there are a lot of scattered windows out around town and a lot of closed businesses. We went to the Riverwalk mall and probably 15% of the places are closed. Our hotel is on the corner of Canal and Bourbon Streets and while we are on the very edge of the French Quarter, there doesn’t seem to be all that many people here.
We’re planning on hitting the hay early tonight and get a good nights rest. The train leave tomorrow at 11:55AM. Lately it has been running several hours late at Los Angeles. It is supposed to arrive at 10:10AM on Wednesday. So far, there have been problems but the arrival times at our destinations have been really good.
Stay tuned…