Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee

November 2011. All Aboard Amtrak's "City of New Orleans"

By this particular point in the evening, the light illuminating the fields whizzing by outside my window had become as red as the soil beneath them.

“What is that?” I wondered aloud about the vista extending to the horizon of a crop I didn’t recognize.

A fellow passenger, making his way slowly down the car with that particular ambling wide-stanced gate that one soon adopts while moving about on a train, overheard me and paused to lean over and take a look.

“That’s milo,” pronounced my new, agriculturally-astute friend. Milo, I was to learn is a grain sorghum grown to feed cattle in parts of the south where corn doesn’t do well.

And there it is…the wonder of train travel. It provides a window to a constantly changing world outside, and the time to make new friends with whom to discuss that world.

I was aboard Amtrak’s City of New Orleans bound eventually for Memphis on a long weekend trip that started out earlier that afternoon at the tiny, historic train depot in downtown Hammond. Several nice things about that particular starting point: free parking, access to Hammond’s vibrant outdoor dining scene for a lunch prior to the mid-afternoon arrival of the train, and access to downtown Hammond’s free wifi network to check on the train’s progress with your smartphone. And that’s important, because the train was indeed a bit delayed, as is often the case for a variety of reasons that range from the weather to the fact previously unknown to me that freight trains have priority on the tracks over passenger trains.

But this trip wasn’t about getting anywhere in a hurry, and just a bit behind schedule, we were on our way for to Jackson, Mississippi—three hours away— the first leg of the trip. Time enough to wander a few cars forward, grab a cup of remarkably good coffee and settle in to the lounge car where I’d planned to read a book. But instead it turned into sort of a mobile cocktail party, filled with conversation (often sparked by the changing landscape through which we passed), a hand of cards or two, and convivial new friends.

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