You can pick your friends, and...

I am going through some of my old travel pictures. Around 1980, I spent a week in the Dominican Republic. I was staying at the Casa De Campo resort, http://resorts.gordonsguide.com/casadecampo/index.cfm a reasonbly expensive place to visit even in those days (I was traveling on an expense account). So one day I was bored with all of the luxury, and decided to wander into town to get an idea of how much of the wealth I was seeing at the resort trickled into town. I was taking a lot of pictures, and realized that I was being followed by a group of children who were as fascinated by me as I was of them. They asked if I would take their picture, and I said ok, just pose but don't make it looked posed. I took the picture, and they all ran away. I really never even looked into the viewfinder to compose the picture, but I've always loved it.

So I was going to make up a story about this picture, but I believe that I could not really make up anything that could embellish the picture. Here is my day visiting The Dominican Republic.

Trains at a distance have every man's wish on board.

But once you are on a train, things change. The first, most obvious change has to do with time. There are tesseracts at every train station gate. When you pass through this portal to the train dimension, your clocks, the printed schedule, perhaps even the day of the week, no longer have anything to do with reality. Departing at 3:45 pm is sort of a guideline, a number to appease accountants, Congress, and the traveling public. In reality, there is train time. Travel at the speed of train- whatever that is. You can neither make it go faster or slower. You, dear reader, are along for the ride with no control of anything except perhaps when to open the bottle of scotch you smuggled aboard. You can pee when you wish, get out of your seat- do a ricochet walk-about to the lounge car, or the dining car at certain times of the day. Please see note about 'train time'. Even dining times are not consistant, and have something to do with what time zone you are in. If the front of the train happens to be in a different time zone that the dining car, you may have to eat an hour early,or an hour later. It is all very confusing.

Speaking of eating in the dining car, I need to describe the accommodations there. There are 14 tables each seating 4 persons, 7 on each side of the train, with a window at each seat, a service area, then a duplication of the first 14 tables. You enter the dining car from one end, and are greeted by the host who seats you at a vacant table, or places you with 2 strangers who may well have been showing up for a different meal depending if they came from the front of the train and in were in Central time zone. For each meal there are 3 0r 4 seatings of approximately 45 minutes each (train time) over the course of a meal period. The actual kitchen is on the lower level of the car while the dining area is on the upper. All food is prepared to order, and cooked on the train which is bouncing back and forth as well as accelerating and slowing sometimes for no apparent reason. I tried to duplicate this feat at home. I would drink a bottle of scotch, then try to cook dinner. It was much like the train in as much as everything continuously moved under my feet.

The serendipity of this arrangement of dining car leads to the purpose of this story: People you meet on a train that you would probably never run into at any other venue on the planet and with whom you have to spend 45 minutes (train time) of your otherwise precious scotch drinking time.

For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of rail travel, I need to point out something bloody obvious. The tracks are fastened to the earth, the train rides on the rails. You are pretty much at the mercy of where the rails go. You cannot 'turn left to avoid construction', 'make the next legal u-turn' 'recalculate', 'stop at the next scenic overlook' or do any of the hundreds of commands programmed into a GPS system. Yet, inexplicably, our first evening dinner companions brought their GPS with them to the dining table. They had it programmed to Portland from Chicago Union Station. Oddly enough the program was for roads, not RAILroads. Every 38 seconds (train time) this little gizmo announced a recalculation because we just trellised over the road it thought we should be traveling. The couple was transfixed by the voice coming out of the little box. Every time (train time) it spoke, they pressed their food filled lips up to the previously clean window to see if the train had made an error in judgement and had turned right toward Canada by mistake. We avoided these people for the remainder of our trip, and even encouraged the Engineer to drive off and leave them at one of the numerous 'smoke breaks' made at train time intervals.

Next episode: The retired, widowed, elementary teachers who had the only queen sized bed room on the train.