It’s been a long day.

We woke up this morning to find ourselves in San Antonio, four hours behind schedule. Our train was to meet up with another train during the overnight hours and switch some passenger cars around. The train we were waiting for was late and we needed to wait for it. And it was raining.

The engineer was able to make up some time along the rest of the route, but we are still behind quite a bit. He did slow down when we crossed the Pecos River High Bridge, one of the highest rail bridges in the U.S., so that we could all get a good look at it. Of course we could not see the bridge, just the view from above.

Beyond that is the rest of West Texas, the most boring scenery ever, just my opinion. We made a few stops to pick up and drop off passengers, not all stops stay long enough for that much-anticipated “smoke break”. We did get a few minutes at Alpine, Texas.

Somewhere along the way, out in the middle of nowhere, we see this blimp-looking thing. What is it? Our guess is that it is or was used for border patrol surveillance since we are very close to the Mexico border.

Then we saw one of the Border Patrol Checkpoint Stations on the highway parallel to the train. The train does not stop here.

It clouded up, looked serious for a while, but only sprinkled.

The next smoke break opportunity was at El Paso, but even that was short to try to make up some of our lost time. In spite of best efforts, there are things that cause delays along the way. Usually it is that we have to wait for freight trains that are in the way. Oh, and we are now in Mountain Daylight Time, so clocks back one hour.

It looks like we will be arriving at our final destination in Benson, Arizona, around 9:18 p.m., four hours late of our scheduled arrival time of 5:18 p.m.  That’s ok, certainly could be worse. We have a car waiting for us, our RV is only two miles from the train stop, and we will sleep in our own beds tonight. Oh yes, Arizona does not do the Daylight Saving Time thing so clocks back an hour.