LA: Waking up in La Junta.

[Ok, I am just now getting around to posting this, but H and I took a trip to LA May 31 - June 7, or thereabouts. For her graduation present, I told her I would take her anywhere in the continental US, and she chose LA. So these next three posts are from that trip. Only 3 posts - we had grandiose plans about our blogging, at least I did, but I think we spent so much time looking for parking spaces and talking to Patrice our GPS gal that it was only on the train trip that anything got written. We flew home - I figured we'd be crabby and exhausted by then and just ready to be home. I was right about 2 out of 3 - we were surprisingly uncrabby. It turned out to be a great trip, with the travel gods blessing us with low-angst karma. To put it another way, nothing went wrong.]

I’ve never been to Colorado. Never stepped foot in it, which is silly since I’ve lived in Missouri for 34 years with CO relatively close. I need to venture out more, it would seem. But you have to suffer through Kansas to get to Colorado, and now I know the best way to do that, short of just flying over it. . Sleep through it in an Amtrak sleeping car.

I did step off the car onto the La Junta platform, during the 8:05 am stretch your legs stop, so I can no longer claim I have never stepped foot in Colorado. Kinda of a waste – wish I’d saved it for a bigger dramatic moment.

Our Roomette is aptly named. Can’t really call it a room; if the beds are down you can barely stand up, a feature that seems to be implied within the definition of Roomness. I played the Age Before Beauty card and relegated Hayden to the upper bunk for the night, from which objects would occasionally tumble down upon me, thankfully though only pillows and one stuffed furry blue moose.

Speaking of traveling companions in the form of inanimate objects to which we assign anthropomorphical qualities, Troll is safely situated in the metal emergency window opening bracket device thing; it would be easy for him to get lost in this Roomette of folding and sliding levers and tracks. He is facing in, though maybe he would prefer to look out at the Colorado scenary. So far, though, it’s very arid and scruffy looking, with only the slightest suggestion of hills, much less mountains. Maybe they are plattes or buttes. I forget my grade school geography. The land is spotted with grazing cattle, dilapidated fencing and the occasional stretch of utility poles, not much else. That’s it, for miles. Rarely even a shanty at this point. Luckily the cows have each other and are kept occupied foraging on this meager landscape and occasionally procreating – it seems pretty lonely out there.