OK, I give up…

The Master of the Universe, Google, has somehow been overcome with myriad technical problems that blocks their ability to let me upload a picture to my Blogger blog. After six tries to get my masterpiece photo of a tree on the blog, and warnings that there are glitches galore, I decided my post entitled Pine eggs will not happen today. Instead I will recount yesterday’s trip to the Big City in the Big Valley.

Karla and I drove to Fresno to meet with Patt (Pat with two Ts, I call her), who is in charge of both Housekeeping and Backpacker Relations at the Muir Trail Ranch. She wanted to discuss the upcoming season and her part in it. We met her at the Amtrak station, one of my favorite places since trains go by and blow their horns, ring their bells and shake the ground with their gut-churning massiveness. While she and Karla talked business I marveled at a BNSF train that must have had a mile and a half of identical hopper cars heading south. We all wondered what the cars were carrying. Patt suggested grain; Karla agreed. I guessed comic books. It was preceded by a northbound Amtrak train that filled with a pant-wettingly-excited batch of six-year-olds in a school group, all of them wearing Amtrak Junior Conductor paper hats. Who knows what excitement they were bound to experience! While we talked, several other Amtrak trains went by since Fresno’s corridor is one of the busiest in the nation with its fourteen trains a day. They’re so busy they don’t have time to turn around at the end of the run; the engineer re-fills the diesel tanks, walks to the opposite end, toots the horn and takes off backward. I doubt if they have time to wash the windshields or empty the ashtrays.

Traveler’s Hint: If you’re lost in California’s Central Valley and don’t have a compass and your GPS unit is busted and you’re near a train track, you can determine which way is north: Amtrak puts its locomotives on the north end of the train, regardless which way the train is headed.