It's weird. I've been going out now for weeks on end, to Galveston, here, there, to a movie, to dinner - it's been so long since I've had a steady companion to spend my time with. My body rather resists - it's been inert for so very long.
This morning, up at 6, out the door at 7, picked up Robert at 7:40 and we went up to Rusk, which is about three hours northeast of Houston to ride the Texas State Railroad.
We rode in my car, and left the interstate at Huntsville, headed east on a succession of Farm to Market roads, with many twists and turns, mostly on two lane undivided pavement.
You know, it just isn't hard work to drive a car on an urban interstate. Even on an interurban interstate, it's not a challenge. Up and down curving hills, with blind corners, no shoulder, on a two lane road - THAT'S work. It was fun. We had my Delphi Nav200 unit on the windshield and Robert's Garmin on the dashboard (he was insisting that his was superior.) The Delphi quickly proved that it would get us LOST, not there, telling us to turn left or right while the Garmin kept telling us "no, stupid, just keep going straight ahead."
We gave up on the Delphi when we realized that not only were its directions poor, it had the wrong true road speed (my speedometer is NOT inaccurate, it's HYPER accurate) and generally had a bad attitude. It is going back into Bram's car now.
The weather was movie-perfect. We zipped along like no one was on the road (mostly because no one was on the road) and pulled up at the Rusk Depot of the Texas State Railroad with 45 minutes to spare before they chuffed out.
Robert insisted that we should pay extra for the climate controlled tickets, and we boarded the combine car which sits in the middle of the train, and dropped our lunch cooler off in the baggage/concession area then headed into the small seating area in the combine car. You can see the combine car just to the left of the depot here:
We were the only people seated in the combine car; everyone else was in one of the other six coaches. After a cab tour (which was more like a cab drive by greeting) of the steam locomotive, we settled in and the train headed off for the 24 mile ride to Palestine.
Being the only ones in the combine car, we enjoyed a very peaceful environment (aside from the rocking back and forth, the traffic back and forth to the concession stand, where Cracker Jacks were the most popular necessity) and arrived in Rusk about ninety minutes after starting for lunch.
Robert had packed a cooler for us, so we sat in the perfect weather under some shade trees and waited for the sign to re-board the train back to Palestine. The engine makes a big "Y" around the depot to turn itself around, and we were perfectly positioned to watch this operation.
Robert walked over to drop a few coins on the rail for the locomotive to smash for a souvenir (I have my penny from his trip up there last weekend.) The locomotive, nor the crew seemed to be much interested in mashing flat our increasingly valueless coinage.
After recoupling to the train, we re-boarded and took our seats again in the combine car. The trip up had been so peaceful - just me and Robert hanging out, talking about whatever we talked about - I was really hoping for solitude again. People walked through but somehow we had an air of exclusivity - people kept saying "this must be a private car or something."
We did pretty darned well until about twenty minutes into the journey back, and a fellow who was loud with his speaking (and his movie camera) brought his daughter into the car and tried to sit her down. Frankly, she wasn't very interested in it. She kept trying to go back to whence they had come. He tried to leave her in the car and retrieve the rest of his tribe, but she had skipped out on him by his return.
He corralled her and got her seated in the pair of seats directly behind us and began chatting her up about nothing (but in a dominating voice.) Robert, as casually as you could imagine, says "Sir? Sir? Are you planning on sitting there for very long? This is a private car, you know. The climate controlled tickets are for the cars behind this one."
And he GOT UP AND TOOK HIS DAUGHTER AND LEFT APOLOGIZING. Uh, I nearly spewed I was choking from trying not to laugh out loud.
What a hoot.
A short time later, some young kids came into the car and sat in some of the seats. We worked to not allow them into consciousness, and they were very well behaved. I kept expecting the guy to come back with his daughter, but he never did.
The trip back was much shorter. It was something - there was no phone signal at all after we left Rusk, and hardly any the whole day. As we were leaving, we noticed that their rail yard had a bunch of equipment that looked interesting, so we peaked around. An old Southern Railroad business car - hmm. Doesn't that need to be in my garage?
The whole day was weird. I should have had a sense of deja vu all day, given that I spent my boyhood growing up with a nearly identical steam excursion railroad in my grandparent's back yard.
And, it wasn't like that. The whole steam thing didn't make me connect to how I felt when I was eight or eleven, and the whole train thing just didn't send me upriver emotionally like it always has. It was a whole new experience, and it was all about hanging out with Robert. Not what we were doing, just that we were doing something.
It was great. It really tells me that the most important things in life are the memories that you create with other people, not what you buy, what you have or what you've seen.
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