Voyages: How to Spend 47 Hours on a Train and Not Go Crazy

With a quiet, pneumatic exhalation, the Sunset Limited left the station; it was 90 minutes into its journey, with 45 hours and 5 minutes to go. After leaving New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal, its point of departure, the seven-car train had rumbled first alongside the New Orleans Arena, where the Hornets play basketball, and then alongside the empty open-air courts, separated from the tracks by chain-link fence and concertina wire, where inmates at Orleans Parish Prison play basketball. It climbed steadily for two miles before passing over the di yingly narrow span of the Huey P. Long Bridge. From up there, 145 feet above the Mississippi River, the river’s full double turn, like a lowercase m written in a la y cursive, was visible; you could see why they called New Orleans the Crescent City.

Whee ing out of Schriever, the train rattled and jerked, and when I entered the lounge car, I had to grab onto the back of a booth to prevent myself from falling facedown in Clair’s lap.

“Woo!” screamed the eight ladies, as if cheering on a toreador. “Hey-ey!” “Choo-choo!” They dissolved into hysterics. It was a little past 10 a.m. They had told each other that they wouldn’t dip into their vodka until noon.

Coot was 52 years and 364 days old, and they were celebrating. “We wanted to take a long train ride together,” she said, “but we weren’t sure how long we could last. This is a trial run.” They left their husbands at home in Thibodaux (“They’re happy to let us go,” Lisa said) and were traveling to Lake Charles, a five-hour ride, where they would check into L’Auberge Casino Resort. After gambling for two days, they would return. If everything went well, they might make it an annual trip. Why, they could go to Memphis (8 hours, 15 minutes), Houston (9 hours, 18 minutes), even San Antonio (15 hours, 5 minutes). They were dressed smartly in pearls, dark sunglasses, shawls, silver bracelets, silver watches and silver medallions with lapis la uli. Most of the women appeared to have styled their hair especially for the excursion. Alice possessed a vaporous cloud of wavy brown hair — her husband called it “big, sexy hair.” Barbara had what she described as a gray dome. She said that when the eight of them got together, it was only so long before someone started catching the wall.

“Someone show that boy how to catch the wall!”

Barbara pulled out her phone and showed videos of friends catching the wall. There are three steps to catching the wall. First, you go down on your hands and knees on the floor, facing away from a wall. Then you jog your legs up the wall, one at a time, until you’re halfway to a headstand. Finally, with your palms planted on the ground, your feet planted on the wall and your butt sticking up in the air, you jiggle. “My stomach hurts because we laugh so much,” Barbara said between laughing fits. “It’s like an aerobic exercise. We’ll all have six-packs by the time we get off the train.”

The women were playing Pedro (“PEE-dro”), a card game popular in Cajun country, something of a cross between bridge and spades. For their trip, Coot printed out special scorecards on which she had typed her friends’ names. They had played Pedro as long as they could remember; it was not uncommon for them to play for 12 hours at a time. While they played, they sang. Lisa led the group in a round of “Gas-Food-Lodging,” a song she wrote when she was 7. Her friends knew all the words.

Voyages: How to Spend 47 Hours on a Train and Not Go Cra y