Today my wife and I leave for a trip to Milwaukee to visit our daughter and son-in-law. We’re traveling north by Amtrak from New Orleans. We’ll fly back.

Like the reasons for most of what I do, it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Like most of what seems like a pretty good idea at the time, my wife goes along only to come back, after reservations have been made and money paid, to ask, “What were you thinking?”

We’ve reserved what Amtrak calls a “Roomette.” I learned long ago to avoid anything with an “ette” attached it, but I did it anyway, even after traveling in one from New Orleans to Memphis last year.

On Amtrak ette means strict economy of space. There are two facing seats in the compartment which each fold forward to make a bunk for one person. I’ve slept in lower berth. With the train’s rockin’ and rollin,’ it wasn’t bad, but I only lay there for a couple of hours before the train arrived in Memphis.

The upper berth is a fold-down contraption that I’m sure that I will become familiar with tonight.

My concern is that Amtrak ettes were manufactured back when the world was lighter and more limber.

Amtrak’s City of New Orleans leaves at 1:45 p.m and arrives in Chicago at 9:00 a.m. the next morning. During this time of year that means most of the trip will be during darkness. Such sights to be seen will be by the light of the moon. Fortunately, it will be full.

And it was only after I had made these reservations that I began to notice all of these stories about the proliferation of bed bugs. All of a sudden, they seem to be everywhere. Stories about them. Maybe bedbugs, too.

I looked on the Internet to see what was being discussed about bedbugs on Amtrak. The forum post that got my attention went something like: “Bedbugs avoid Amtrak. The beds are too uncomfortable.”

So, what was I thinking?

I was thinking that after Mary and Phil have been in Milwaukee for five years, it’s time for us to visit them, especially since Mary found out that she is pregnant, due in March. We need to find our way up there — sort of a practice run.

Both expectant parents are doing fine, thank you. It’s the expectant grandmother we’re a little concerned about. Not Rosemary, but Phil’s mother, Linda Taylor.

That Linda has been scarcely able to contain her anticipation is profound understatement. She’s been so excited that even her husband Lowell has been counseling caution.

But it’s good for babies to come into the world wanted and eagerly awaited. And if Linda’s anticipation is amplified by that distance of miles between her and her grandchild, it is amplified anticipation we share as well.

(I’ll amend this column with further observations of this trip posted to www.panolian.com.)

Shocked and awed she was when we opened the door to that roomette.
Maybe the ette had shrunk since my only other ette encounter of few hours duration. Or maybe it was the thought of the two of us spending most of  17 or more hours in that space. A very small space.
We soon saw confirmation that those Amtrak cars had been manufactured in a day when the world was lighter and more limber. There were sleeping car passengers aboard who were forced to navigate the narrow hallway in the center of the car by turning sideways. I am not making this up. The hallway in quite narrow. When two people meet, it’s like cars meeting on the narrow, one-lane bridges we encountered on country roads somewhere in the last century. Somebody had to back up.
So it remains a mystery to us about how some of those folks navigated into the ette’s top pull-down bunk. From the top of two steps leading upward, the would-be top bunk sleeper had to swing sideways and with very little overhead clearance into the top. Once in, there was a safety netting that hooked into the ette’s ceiling.
In those bunks — her on the bottom and me on the top — we rocked and rolled for hours that long night. We last saw the daylight as the sun set amidst mixed clouds over the Delta at Yazoo City. We next saw daylight under cloudy skies over northern Illinois farmland.