On to California for Pancakes Horses, and Dogs!
The dynamic duo (that might be a bit of literary license for a couple of old round guys), wake up on Monday, 8 April in a northern suburb of Dallas. The plan is to return to the Texas Eagle and make our way to LA by Wednesday morning. First order of business, pay a visit to El Grande Burrito Cafe for another round of breakfast tacos. I have one sausage and one chorizo, JoeG has one bacon and one chorizo taco. All are sufficiently doused with green chili sauce and enjoyed down to the last bite!! We grab a ticket for the Dart Orange line for the 43 minute ride to Dallas Union Station. We arrive at the station a few minutes early, but since we are fortified with our morning tacos, we decide not to stroll thru the West End and be tempted by other goodies. Instead, we find a bench by the fountain in a very pleasant park right in front of the station and spend a few minutes considering our options for when we reach LA.
The Texas Eagle pulls into the Big D on time and we settle into our roomettes for the trip west. The countryside between Fort Worth and Austin is quintessential Texas; beautiful ranches tucked into rolling hills, lots of gnarly live oaks and mountain cedar trees, meandering brooks and rivers, majestic stands of pecan groves, and all American small towns. This is four hours or so of very peaceful riding and dreaming, half expecting to see 2000 head of cattle being herded north by a company of cowboys to one of the famous old railheads. The dream is interrupted by a nightmare - Jim Hudson gets on the train at Temple, TX! We get to ride along with Jim and swap lies for a while. Regretfully, our dinner reservation comes due about 20 minutes before Jim gets off at Austin. If you have learned anything about the 2Joes, a choice between talking to Jim, and eating dinner, no contest! Jim has to do the last 20 minutes by himself. We say our goodbyes and figure to see Jim, in the same place, on different day, in the not too distant future.
We arrive in San Antonio in good order at about 10:30pm and hit the rack shortly thereafter. The jostling to connect our sleeper to the tail end of the Sunset Limited is apparently pretty minor; at least it doesn't wake me up. When we leave San Antonio, we are the “caboose” so we have the advantage of the “railfan window”. One of the landmark highlights of this advantage is hard to enjoy with the newly scheduled early departure. The train is now past Del Rio and has crossed the Amistad Reservoir before daylight so you can't see the bridge. On that subject, rolling into LA at 5:30 a.m. rather than midmorning seems to have very little advantage, much less creature comfort, for the average passenger. But that is a gripe for a whole different thread that has been wrung out before.
After breakfast we begin to work on ETA's into El Paso. Our plan is to make a lunch reservation for about a half hour after the El Paso arrival just in case Juanita, the burrito lady, is not present on the platform. Heaven forbid that we get aced out of a chance for a meal! We arrive in El Paso, Juanita is right there; we hop off the train and are the first in line to buy her wares. I get a couple of bean and cheese and one beef and green chili burritos. JoeG, previously referred to as “iron gut”, goes for three of the beef and green chili “fire sticks”. One failure in our prior planning; we didn't get down to the Cafe for a couple of beers before the El Paso stop. The Cafe was closed for about 45 minutes so we used water (argh!) to wash the burritos down. I'm not real sure that the beef had the good old USDA seal of approval. In any case, even iron gut suffered some distress later on!!
We roll into LA 30 min ahead of the 5:30 scheduled arrival. Even Philippe's is not open at this ungodly hour. Amtrak should be required to coordinate with Philippe's before making such a gross scheduling error! Once the sun comes up and the station comes to life, we grab a car and head for Arcadia, our home away from home for the next four days. We decide to check with the hotel first thing to try to sweet talk an early check in and to get a little local knowledge about breakfast diners. Pauline, the desk manager, works her magic and assures us we will have a room as soon as we return from breakfast. Meanwhile, Alma, her assistant, gives us the low down on the restaurant scene in the area. We decide Le Roy's Diner in Monrovia sounds like a place we would enjoy and off we go. Le Roy's holds about 40 people, has a good crowd, and it smells really good. I go for the pancake breakfast. JoeG orders a chorizo and cheese omelette, it's huge and he finishes it off. All is well with the world. We get back to the hotel and our rooms are ready as promised by Pauline.
We spend some time getting familiar with the area and resting up from the trip. About supper time we head to Max's Mexican Restaurant. We had some ideas about supper but all of that was overcome by events when we walked in the bar. They were having happy hour treats, a tray of meat enchiladas and another tray of bean and cheese burritos along with chips and fresh chopped salsa. Oh, and did I mention 34 oz beers? We ordered one serving of Martha's world famous guacamole and made supper out of that, bar snacks, and two beers. It was a pretty cheap evening. JoeG was driving and decided with another beer we might just get to demonstrate why cars have air bags, so we called it a night.
Thursday we did a Surfliner points run from Glendale to Santa Barbara and return. At Van Nuys, trainman74 (Jim) came aboard and rode to Santa Barbara with us for breakfast. We enjoyed getting to meet Jim and learning a little about the local area. This is a two hour ride that is broken into three distinct segments. The first segment is LA suburbs and it is hard to tell when you leave one town and enter the next. The next segment is neatly manicured truck farms, lots of lemons, lettuce, and some stuff we didn't identify but the majority of the area was strawberry fields. They were at the height of harvest and lots of activity was going on all along the way. The last segment of the trip is oceanside with beautiful views of the big pond and the popular camping and surfing scene. Once we arrived in Santa Barbara, our destination was Sambo's Pancake House. JoeG knew a short cut so it was a short 3 block walk and we were there.
If you are the age of the 2Joes and came in with the first load of dirt, you remember Sambo's Pancake Houses all across the country in the late 70's. The genesis of the name came from a combination of the owners names: SAM Battistone and Newell BOhnette. It was a big hit in Santa Barbara and soon began to franchise across the U.S. The chain used the association with the children's book to market their pancakes and decorate the walls in the restaurants. They had a good product and it quickly grew to operate in 47 states. As they expanded into the northeast, lawsuits began to appear in that part of the country claiming the name was pejorative toward African Americans. At the same time the salaried managers were being offered a compensation package that could not keep up with the expansion. This package was the underlying backbreaker for the franchise shops. Within three years the franchise was gone and another up and coming breakfast house named Denny’s was waiting in the wings to pick up many, if not most, of the properties at a song. This left only the original site in Santa Barbara which, today, is owned and operated by Sam Battistone's granddaughter. OK, the history lesson is over. Both Joes had a stack of pancakes and Jim used his “young man's appetite” to eat most everything else they had in the store!! Good food and a gorgeous day to relax for a while by the sea. It is no wonder this city is nicknamed the American Riviera.
Friday we are up early heading to Clocker's Corner at Santa Anita Park. This is an area at the track you can get breakfast, mingle with the trainers and jockeys, and get a racing form to prepare for the day. It's a great experience to get so close to these beautiful thoroughbred animals and watch them go thru their paces. By 1 pm we are prepared for the first race. Today we have reservations in the Frontrunner Restaurant. This restaurant is typical of the clubhouse restaurant at most tracks. A completely enclosed room but all glass on the side facing the race track so you can watch all of the action from your table. The menu includes sandwiches, plate lunches, salads, etc and is available throughout the afternoon. I have a cheeseburger with homemade “Saratoga” chips. It is an average burger. JoeG selects a flatbread with steak tips and red peppers, a much better choice and very filling. By the way, when I pick a horse to win a race, he is probably the next horse to go to the glue factory. One more interesting fact on this race track; it is the only track in the country that has a downhill turf course. It is about 6 1/2 furlongs, starts on the far backside of the parking lot, comes down the hill, and turns onto the main track to race down the turf straightaway and finish at the normal finish line. Very unique, very fun!
We go back to the track on Saturday. Not so much to continue the humiliation of being the worst horse pickers in southern California, but, to sit in the grandstand and have access to another famous sandwich of LA. The carved sandwich counter is only steps from our seats! Having a carved sandwich at Santa Anita is more than a tradition for many, it is an outright necessity! We both ordered the hand sliced corned beef on rye with sliced brine pickles and lots of mustard. Now, that's good eatin'!! Yum, Yum! You can also get hand carved roast beef, turkey or ham - a favorite choice for everyone.
On Sunday we are scheduled for departure on the late afternoon Southwest Chief. I would like to see the La Brea Tar Pits so we figure out a route to get us to the tar pits on the way to Union Station. We are en-route to Wilshire Blvd where the tar pits are located when we pass La Brea Ave. I alert JoeG (he's driving) that we should turn here and parallel Wilshire. He doesn't see the point but off we go. A few blocks down the street we “stumble” across Pinks Hot Dog Stand - arguably the most famous hot dog stand in the country. We know the folks in Chicago and New York will argue this fact to the death, but let's agree it is certainly in the top three. This joint has been here since 1939 when Paul Pink had a large push cart at this location. It now has a small building with outdoor tables in the back and a parking lot that is constantly full of everything from Rolls Royce’s to a struggling musician’s Winnebago. Pink’s is quality and quantity, mouth watering chili, generously topping an all beef, perfectly cooked hot dog with mustard and onions. I got the original chili dog, JoeG got the New York dog (topped with sweet hot onion sauce), and we split an order of chili/cheese fries. The great chili we had on the dogs at The Angry Dog (gastro 4.1) is suddenly not at the top of the list. This stuff is awesome! Sometimes you just get lucky! By the way, we did make our way over to the La Brea Tar Pits for some culture, but what a shame it would have been to miss this iconic hot dog stand.
Our last stop is Union Station. We have an hour or so before we can board the SW Chief, so we wander across the street to a Heritage Festival and have a piping hot Churro on Olvera St. For those of you who are keeping score and realize we have not been to Philippe's yet, you can relax. We drop by the french dip “temple” for a couple of adult pops just before boarding the train. Our plan is to take the Chief to Kansas City and the Mo. River Runner to St Louis. Regretfully, an assistant conductor has a heart problem about two hours down the route and delays us about an hour; and we lose another hour during the night. The hope is to make up the time during the dwell in ABQ and we do get back about an hour. But then, high winds around Raton force a 40 mph slow order for 3 or 4 hours. We cannot overcome the delays and miss our connection in Kansas City by about an hour.
Not to be deterred, we reschedule for the afternoon train and consider checking out downtown. A rubber wheeled conveyance (do they call it a bus?) delivers us to the heart of downtown where we find one of the popular eateries near the ball park known as The Quaff on Broadway. It serves us well for a Bloody Mary “eye opener”. Downtown is not particularly visitor friendly during the middle of the day (mostly large office buildings) so we make our way back to the train station intent on trying Fiorella's Jack Stack for another lunch. JoeG has the burnt ends special and I have an excellent wood-fired chicken and sausage gumbo. So our “bonus” time in Kansas City yields us a couple of fun joints and we journey on to our destination. As I make my way back to Grand Rapids, I calculate how we are doing on our initial goal to make Select Executive this year. We are now a little ahead of schedule with about 8500 TQP. We should make the half way mark next week when we head to San Antonio for FIESTA!!
