Before this leg of the trip, it was probably the one I was least excited about. The prospect of spending nearly 2 days crossing mostly desert wasn't exactly that exciting to me. And indeed, the desert got pretty old pretty fast. Yes, there is a certain beauty about the desert, but this New England girl doesn't need 2 days of it - about 2 hours would have been sufficient. Everything was just so brown. Even the trees and plants were a greenish-brown. It was really depressing to me.
Perhaps Palm Springs is a nice place to visit in the winter, but I can't understand why anyone would live there in the summer. It was unbelievably hot. And it wasn't just hot, there was the hot wind, as well. Yuck.
No saguaro cacti for dad - we went through much of Arizona and New Mexico during the first night, but we did see plenty of prickly pear cactus all over. I had the Bare Necessities prickly pear line in my head the whole time.
The big excitement of the second day on the train were the rain storms that came through. Texas hasn't gotten a lot of rain, so they needed it. And I can't complain - it was the very first rain that we've seen in 2 weeks. But goodness, did it come down. This wasn't just a shower, this was a full fledged thunderstorm with lightening all around. Because you can see forever out there, the lighting bolts clearly visible.
Toward the end of the trip, Eastern Texas and Louisiana were a lot more green. We crossed the Mississippi River again, this time at the southern end of the river.
I'll do a separate post when we are done in New Orleans, but we have already made the obligatory trip to Cafe Du Monde. Delicious. The sniffles I've had the last few days turned into a full blown cold or something last night, so that wiped out any exciting evening plans, but I'm feeling a little better today, so hopefully it was just a 24 hour thing.
For more pictures, check out the second half of this album.
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