A few more tidbits from the Sunset Limited

Now that I am fully awake, it occurs to me that there are a couple things I forgot to include in the last post...

1. In El Paso, we got to travel right along the US-Mexican border.  There is a small fence that runs along the border but then it just stopped right at the edge of some houses on the Mexican side.  It seems to me that if someone was looking to cross the border, that would be a pretty obvious place. (See picture above)  There were border control officials at a lot of the stops in Texas (and also at one of the stops in Montana from way back...).
2. I nearly forgot about the worst of all our meal companions so far.  We've probably had nearly 20 meals so far and have eaten with people from all over the country (and one guy from Canada) but this girl takes the cake.  I think she is probably the only person we've eaten with that has been younger than me - she was 13.  Her grandmother was returning her to her parents in San Antonio after a long visit - and I'm pretty sure that her grandmother was glad to be rid of her.  I like to think I am pretty tolerant of teenagers, but this girl irritated me from the very start.  She was very much a know-it-all (and also very wrong about things) - she was absolutely certain that the Salton Sea, a very large lake in Southern California, was part of the ocean because it was called a sea.  She had very strong opinions about the subjects of science (her favorite) and history (her least favorite), and was just overly opinionated.  We made certain to avoid them the rest of the trip.
3. One of my favorite railroad employees so far was the waiter we had on this train.  For the most part, the waitstaff has been good, but Riley is the tops so far.  After the train ran out of Pepsi at dinner on day 2 (ew, stuck with diet Pepsi for that meal), Riley did 2 things for me.  First, our dinner companions that night apparently had an extra can of Pepsi in their room, which they gave to Riley to give to me later that night (I guess I should thank the dinner companions more for that one).  He looked up our room number on the meal tickets and came knocking on the door with the gift.  But then at lunch on the last day, Riley took my order and then said that he'd make the Pepsi happen one way or another.  He came back with 2 small cans of soda for me from his "secret store" of soda.  I bet they came from the lounge car or something, but it was still very nice of him, even if he made fun of me for drinking soda at every single meal...