Father's Daze

For our 35th wedding anniversary, my wife and I decided to re-create Arlo Guthrie’s only Top 20 hit.

No, we didn’t go to Alice’s Restaurant — they made a movie out of that, but it was never a single and never reached the Top 20.

We went “ridin’ on the City of New Orleans” to celebrate 35 years. It seemed appropriate, since the song has been around only a little bit longer than our marriage.

When Steve Goodman first wrote the song, it was still the “Illinois Central, Monday morning rail.” Now, it’s Amtrak, and we boarded it on Thursday night, not Monday morning, but it was still a great way to travel.

The City of New Orleans still leaves out of Chicago, so we had to get to Chicago first, which meant taking the Hiawatha from Milwaukee to Chicago.

While sitting in the waiting room in Milwaukee, we heard a young lady behind us, with her parents, wondering what time her train got to Memphis and worrying about catching the right train in Chicago. Knowing that the City of New Orleans is the only Amtrak train from Chicago that stops in New Orleans, we volunteered to chaperone Christine until we all got on the right train in Chicago

Apparently it was her first train trip alone — she was going to visit relatives in Memphis — so she, and more importantly her parents, was at ease having someone to help keep her on track, so to speak.

We stood in line with her for the train in Chicago, took a seat in the coach across the aisle from her, and led her through Union Station in Chicago to the track for the City of New Orleans, then waited with her for half an hour or so until we boarded the train.

Unfortunately, from that point she was on her own, since we had a roomette to New Orleans and she was riding coach to Memphis. We didn’t even get to make sure she got off the train all right, since the Memphis stop was at about 6:30 the next morning, but we have to assume Christine made it the rest of the way without our help.

We got on the train in Chicago and found our roomette as the train pulled out around 8 p.m. We were in the room right across the hall from Tina, our sleeping car attendant, who told us we could call her anything but “the help.”

We got to head for the dining car right away, since meals in the dining car were part of our sleeping car service, to enjoy a fashionably late dinner.

Since the dining car has a limited seating capacity, we shared our table with others riding the train for all our meals. It makes for a great way to meet fellow travelers — something that’s hard to do over half a can of soda and a bag of stale peanuts on your average airplane flight.

We had dinner with a couple from Reno, Nev., who traveled across the country in their motor home but had to leave it in New Orleans when she had to fly back to Reno for a medical emergency. They were taking the train to New Orleans to reclaim their RV and this was the second leg of their train journey.

For breakfast Friday morning our company was a psychiatrist from Bloomington, Minn., who was heading to a psychiatrists’ convention in Baton Rouge.

He joked that he was heading there to get away from his menopausal wife and teenage daughter because he was “tired of getting stuck between them.” Judging by our breakfast conversation, I’d say he’s probably a very effective — and successful — psychiatrist.

We had lunch Friday with a young man who was an artist’s assistant in Columbus, Ohio. He had driven to Fulton, Ky., to get on the train at 3 o’clock in the morning and was traveling to New Orleans to visit his brother.

He admitted he wasn’t sure if he would make the train, since the “train station” in Fulton is just a glorified trailer and there were no station personnel there at 3 a.m., but the train did stop to pick him up.

Among those riding the train was a little boy celebrating his fourth birthday by taking the train to New Orleans with his father and grandfather on a “boys-only” weekend.

Thursday also happened to be my birthday — although admittedly, I was celebrating a few more of them than the little guy was.

He had a birthday hat on, and the dining car crew brought him a cupcake with a candle on it for his birthday. Terry tried to get that for me as well, but apparently Amtrak won’t do that for someone who’s older than the train on which he’s riding.

While the train had less than 15 cars, there were a lot more than 15 riders, restless or not. In fact, the sleeper cars were full both ways, to New Orleans and back to Chicago when we returned the next Tuesday.

We passed a lot of towns, but they all had names, along with a lot of great scenery — from the prairies of Illinois to the bayous of Louisiana — that we could watch go by from our roomette window or a comfortable seat in the observation car, without having to worry about traffic or road construction, how soon we would have to stop for gas, or if we’d make it to the motel in time.

We certainly weren’t singing the disappearing railroad blues on this trip. NEXT WEEK: Hot times in N’awlins.