Post-Antarctica   Returning to New York from Antarctica on December 1, there was just a bit of relocation shock. I’d never taken a major trip in November before, and it seemed that I’d lost those three weeks somehow as far as readjusting is concerned. Maybe when one travels in the summer, especially when staying in the northern hemisphere, it’s less noticable. Anyway, hearing Christmas music in the supermarket that first day was a cultural shock. Christmas is so commercialized and over-extended in the first place, but I had the feeling on December 1 that it was still early November. Christmas music?

Worse was the change in daylight, which is significant between early November and early December. Why was the sun going down at 4:45 if I still felt it was early November? To compound this, just three days earlier I had been at 65°S, not quite reaching the Southern Midnight Sun, but being close enough so that there was twilight at midnight. So why was the sun setting in the late afternoon now?

Before leaving on the trip I was aware that the animated film “Happy Feet” would be coming out, and I went to see it shortly after returning. It was an easy film to bond to after being there, and it was very accurate. The short scene of the rusted whaling station is really what it looks like, although the church they show on a pinnacle was on ground level and was on South Georgia. The rapid leap-splash swimming technique of the penguins was accurate. They show a leopard seal, which was reminiscent of the fur seals we saw. The four talking male elephant seals looked just what male elephant seals would look like if they could talk. The film is about emperor penguins, but the shorter king penguins we saw are still quite large and also keep their eggs in a pouch above their black claws/feet, and have similar orange-yellow markings behind the eye. The four smaller penguins they show as a group of friends (the lead one is voiced by Robin Williams in a Spanish accent), are very clearly Adelie penguins, recognizable by the white ring surrounding the eye, and also by the pink claws/feet of the smaller penguins.

It’s worth now mentioning three things I didn’t take the time to discuss earlier, since all three are in the film: skuas, nests, and macaronis. The large, predatory seabird known as the skua makes an appearance in the film, and we saw them frequently, either flying behind the ship or on land, trying to steal a penguin egg from a nest.

As to nests, I only mentioned in passing (Reflections 2006 Series 15, Day 8) that we saw gentoos on nests, these happening to be on the top of tussocks. As it turns out, the smaller penguins do build nests, and parents take turns sitting on the egg(s). These penguins seem to have a passion for pebbles to help build the nests, and we did see individuals carrying a pebble in their beak for nest building. A major point is made in the film about this infatuation for pebbles.

Finally, the macaroni penguins. We didn’t see any on the landings, although possibly the people who took the Land Rover penguin trip in the Falklands did. In the film, a macaroni penguin plays a major role, also voiced by Robin Williams. Click here for macaroni penguin pictures on Fotosearch: Macaroni Penguin But the reason they're called macaronis is a story worth telling.

MACARONI & MACARONIS Macaroni penguins are the most numerous penguin of all, there being an estimated nine million breeding pairs of them. They also might be the most colorful, but the reason for their name is what interests me most. Usually, the naming metaphor is obvious. When you hear of a chinstrap penguin, and see the black line ear to ear under its chin, the connection to a helmet with a chinstrap springs to mind immediately. But macaroni penguins?

When hearing the word, one thinks immediately about pasta, since macaroni is an English variant spelling of the Italian maccherone, (plural: maccheroni), referring to a pasta that technically must not contain eggs. Macaroni has been known in the US since none other than Thomas Jefferson introduced the first macaroni machine in 1789 on his return from serving as Ambassador to France.

But put pasta out of your mind. Even before 1789 the word macaroni was known in the US because of the macaroni fashion, which to me is the most interesting part of this story. And from the original use of the word to the point of naming penguins with the word come layer upon layer of metaphors and other associations.

In the 18th Century, maccherone in Italian also referred to a “boorish fool”. It is not unusual to use foods to describe people, and the foods need have absolutely nothing to do with the characteristic involved. Why do we call a nice person a good egg? Or an inactive person a couch potato? Years ago an attractive woman was called a tomato. So the first step in this separation of the literal meaning of macaroni as pasta from other uses of the word was calling a fool (in Italian) a maccherone.

Young men who had been on the Grand Tour to Italy adopted that word, as macaroni, to designate any fashion that was, foolishly perhaps, way over the top. They described such exaggerated fashion as being very macaroni. These dandies or fops dressed in outrageous colors and stripes, had the highest powdered wigs (the fashion at the time) with long curls, possibly with a hat so high on the wig that you couldn’t reach it, and they otherwise set themselves apart as being very noticeable and affected, in speech as well. They were the metrosexuals of their day, at very least. They may have used feathers, but that was not essential. These people willfully setting themselves apart as “foolishly fashionable” macaronis is the second phase of the genesis of the word.

The third phase of the story brings up the song Yankee Doodle, popular during the American Revolution, which makes fun of a Yankee who “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni”. Unless one knows of the macaroni fashion, this line will never make sense. The song is laughing at a simple, naïve Yankee who felt that nothing more than a single feather added to his hat would make him fashionable enough to be part of the macaroni fashion. These may have been alternative lyrics that started with the teasing of the British soldiers, but they were also enthusiastically taken over by the Yankees themselves, and incorporated into the song, possibly to boast that Yankees were indeed simpler, more basic folk than those across the Atlantic.

Only because of this song, where macaroni now became associated with a feather for the first time, do we come to the fourth level of meaning shift, the macaroni penguin. Since it’s another type of smaller penguin, distinguished by bright, thin, yellow and black feathers chaotically sprouting from above each ear, and knowing the full story of the changes in the word macaroni other than it referring to pasta, what more appropriate name could there be for it than macaroni penguin?

[To evoke the political mood of this 18C song, which, although today considered a children’s song, was then very much a popular song of the day for adults, we have it here sung on YouTube. Unfortunately the singer leaves out the particular lines we’ve been discussing, but the spirit of the song still comes through: Yankee Doodle ]

Intrepid   Four days after returning, I looked up one morning from my Times and bagel and saw a museum sailing past my window. Since 1982, the WWII aircraft carrier Intrepid has been on display in midtown as the centerpiece of the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. It has been in the news lately that it needed refurbishing, but that the first effort to move it ended in failure, since it was too deeply buried in the mud. I had heard that they were going to try again, and as I looked up, I saw they were successful. The ship is 900 feet long and weighs 36,000 tons. Its first stop is across the river in Bayonne where the hull will be sandblasted and repainted, then it’s on to Staten Island in March for interior renovation. It is scheduled to return to West 46th Street by November 2008. In the next day’s Times, there was a front-page picture of the Intrepid sailing past Battery Park City taken from a helicopter on the Jersey side of the river. My building, the Regatta, though tiny, was clearly visible on the Manhattan shore. Maybe if I had waved...

Central Park Boathouse   In addition to several other annual December gatherings I go to, the Middlebury College New York Alumni had its annual gathering at the Boathouse Restaurant in Central Park, which is only a few minutes’ walk off Fifth Avenue at the East 72nd Street entrance. Even though it was already dark in the early evening, one could see from the terrace of the restaurant how attractively the moonlight shone on the lake. The reception was in the almost barn-like Lake Room, where in the center there was a huge appetizer table, and around the room, several pasta and carving stations, and beverage stations. Middlebury treats its alumni well, which shouldn’t be surprising, since I’m sure they hope alumni will reciprocate. I understand there were an unusually large number of 600 alumni expected. I sought out President Ron Leibowitz, who remembered me from the past. At first that surprised me, but then I decided it really shouldn’t. Middlebury awards very few Doctorates of Modern Language; when you divide recipients among the several language schools, the German School’s share would be correspondingly fewer. As to husband and wife getting a doctorate together—well, that’s unique, so it’s less unusual that Leibowitz can place me.

When I went to Middlebury the first time in the summers of 1959-60-61, there were five language schools, German was the oldest dating from 1915; French was the longest-running, since the German school was forced to close down for some years after WWI; Italian, Spanish, and Russian. Each had at least one language school abroad (now there are several for each school), such as in Mainz where Beverly and I studied. When we returned for our doctorate study in the summers from 1975 to 1980, the Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic Schools had been added, and recently the Portuguese School as well. While speaking to Dr Leibowitz I found out that the Arabic school was about to open its first school abroad, in Alexandria, Egypt. He also confided that financing had been accomplished to shortly open a Hebrew School. That’s quite a bit of progress in less than a century. Even the staff is imbued with language study. I was speaking to a staff member, who had attended the Chinese School, and, as an undergraduate, Dr Leibowitz had attended the Russian School.

Tom's Restaurant   This is just a passing point that may be of interest. I happened to be on Broadway and 110th Street, just six blocks south of Columbia University, and wanted a bite to eat. I walked uptown just a bit, and then in the distance I saw a very familiar sign on the NE corner of Broadway and 112th Street. It was a bright red neon sign, just saying “RESTAURANT” in capital letters. Many of us have seen this sign many times. Remember where?

On almost every episode of Seinfeld, the cast gathers in a booth at Monk’s to hang out, and Tom’s Restaurant is always used for the exterior shot to portray Monk’s. As I recall, on the show it just says “RESTAURANT” on both sides, which makes it look particularly peculiar, but in actuality, the Broadway side does include the word “TOM’S”. I sat in one of the booths, but the layout is entirely different than on the show, whose interiors were regularly filmed in California.

Garrison Keillor and the New York Philharmonic   We used to listen to “A Prairie Home Companion” with Garrison Keillor on PBS radio quite regularly, and about 11-12 years ago, while temporarily living full-time in Florida, but visiting New York, we went to see a broadcast of his show from Town Hall in New York, which he regularly does in December, this month as well. However, I had heard that he also does an annual concert with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, and, as soon as tickets went on sale online this September for this year’s December show, I bought one. In his offbeat way of saying things, he called it “The Good Enough Holiday Show”. The orchestra appeared in tuxes and gowns, and Keillor also wore a tux—and red sneakers. It was great fun, with Keillor telling stories alternating with musical selections. He talked a lot about having lived in New York, and visiting frequently. When he said at the beginning, in his slow, laconic way of speaking “New York ignores things that didn’t happen here ... [some laughs] ... but makes an exception for Christmas”, it brought down the house.

I had never been to a concert of the New York Philharmonic, which is by far the oldest symphonic orchestra in the US, dating from 1842, and one of the oldest in the world. In late 2004 it gave its 14,000th concert, a milestone unmatched by any other symphonic orchestra in the world. It is ironic that, since every New Year’s Day I watch the annual New Year’s Concert broadcast from Vienna (Wien), hosted by Walter Cronkite, I’m more familiar with die Wiener Philharmoniker.

One of the original songs Keillor sang described a Christmas dinner in his fictional village of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota including lutefisk (whether New Yorkers knew what that was or not). Each verse mentioned the people who attended, the first verse being full of Petersens, then the next Olsens, Larsens, Nilsens. I read somewhere else that Keillor has said that, if Lake Wobegon were to exist in New York City, it would be in Staten Island.

He had the audience do several singalongs with the orchestra, the closing selection being (no surprise) Silent Night. Interestingly, the program had the text of the less familiar second verse before the first, so we’d go out on a bang. But much more interestingly, he wanted everyone to sing the two verses first in the original German (Stille Nacht!, heilige Nacht!), then in English, which was how it was shown in the program. I was proud of the New York audience for pulling it off, although I’m sure most had to fake their way through it. Maybe it was a concert of die New Yorker Philharmoniker after all.

Free Variation   We are all familiar with a number of words that have two possible pronunciations, very obviously “either”, which can be EEther or EYEther, and there’s even a song saying that I say toMAYto and you say toMAHto. These variations can be within a dialect, or you can have variations between dialects, such as “dance”, which in American usage is dænss and in British usage is dahnss (note how handy the letter ash continues to be). The linguistic term for two possible pronunciations being easily interchangable, with everyone understanding both, is free variation.

It only recently occurred to me that there is a word with three common pronunciations, all in free variation. Not only that, it has a potential fourth pronunciation that doesn’t actually exist. Curious?

The word is “vase”. It can start out as VAY- or VAH-, and end with ZZ or SS. Simple math would point out that there should then be four possibilities, right?

Most flexible is VAY-, which can combine to form VAYZZ, the pronunciation I grew up with, or VAYSS, the pronunciation I picked up from Beverly and still continue to use. Finally, VAH- can combine with ZZ to form VAHZZ, a pronunciation adopted from French and popularly used in Britain, which completes three perfectly normal pronunciations, all in free variation with each other. I find this unusual.

It is common linguistic practice to use an asterisk to indicate a possible form that doesn’t actually exist, so the fourth potential, but nonexistant possibility, would be the other combination of VAH-, with SS, as *VAHSS. It seems logical that this could be a fourth possibility, but no one actually says it.

Wordplay 10   2006 has been our year of the Wordplay, which we started in April and will conclude now in December. As always, some are simple enough to require little explanation, and others, being useful to illustrate facts about language, will be explained more fully.

Let’s start with an easy one in Portuguese. Note that pouco, similar to Spanish poco, means “little”. Also learn this about Portuguese in general: in words ending in O it is always pronounced as U, which happens in every single word in this wordplay (como sounds like comu). If this sounds like something you learned that also happens in Scandinavian, you get a gold star.

What LOOKS like O-O in every word comes out as O-U. Speaking of Scandinavian, here are two in Norwegian. The first one interchanges F and FL.

This is a rather nonsensical headline-type phrase mixing KS and SK. If you remember what we noted some time ago, you will not be surprised that vask- means wash.

Note that in Spanish, pica means “picks at, pokes”, and a pico is a pick. As often happens, the second line is a reversal of the first.

This next one capitalizes on the fact that in Spanish, “to count”, “to tell”, and “story” are all similar words to each other, and also to others.

Here’s one in German with one-word sentences. Consider that it should not be odd that, since tomorrow always starts with the morning, in some languages those two words are the same. In Spanish, mañana means both “tomorrow” and “morning”, and in German, morgen means “tomorrow” and Morgen means “morning”. This dialog takes place at an understocked fish market.

It simply doesn’t work in English; in German it’s all understandable based on the intonation.

This one in Italian plays around with PC changing with CP and other P’s, all while the vowels battle each other. Piatto is “plate”. Poco here can be used to mean “not very”.

This Latvian one mixes KL, GL, KR.

We did a French sentence back in Wordplay 6 (Reflections 2006 Series 3) that tricks you into saying something different that’s quite foolish. Here’s another French one that does the same thing.

The above is true, but when you say it, you’re tricked into actually saying the nonsensical:

The last one in this group is my favorite, and it’s in Russian. It’s easy to read in the original, since it has only four Cyrillic letters in it, к, о, а, and л; three are as in the Latin alphabet, so you only have to recognize that last letter as L. The wordplay makes super use of what we discussed earlier about Russian, the phenomenon of аканье/akan’ye, meaning that all unstressed O’s are pronounced as A’s. Watch: кол (kol) is a post in the ground. A variation [genitive case] is кола, which is end-stressed. Because of akan’ye, this is now pronounced kaLA, and the O disappears in pronunciation.

A колокол (kolokol) is a bell. It’s stressed on the first syllable, so even here it shows akan’ye, being pronounced KOlakal. But the plural, колокола, is end-stressed, so it’s pronounced kalakaLA, with all the O’s disappearing. Here’s the wordplay. The (new) first word is stressed at the beginning:

Of all the O’s you SEE in the original, only that very first one is stressed and survives when pronounced, and this wordplay ends up sounding like a jackhammer, since you repeat the combination “kala” four times.

Mexico: 1967   In 1967 we decided it was time to visit Mexico. Beverly had been studying Spanish at home (as I had been studying French at home, so that we both would have, with German, strong bases in all three second languages), and we found a three-week summer course in Mexico City. We spent all of July and half of August in Mexico, making connections by plane and bus, with one train connection. In those years, multiple-stop plane tickets were common, so we flew to New Orleans, then to Mérida in the Yucatan to see the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itza and Uxmal. This was before Cancún and other nearby beach areas had blossomed. We later went on to Acapulco on the Pacific coast, which was THE beach resort at the time. The rest of the trip was to multiple locations in high-altitude central Mexico, where a large number of places of interest are located (altitude indicated in feet for some of these places, but all are high). We flew to Oaxaca (waHAca) (5068’), then we mostly used the really-quite-good-for-buses Mexican intercity bus system to connect to Pátzcuaro (7018’), Morelia (6324’), Guanajuato (6855’), Dolores Hidalgo (6239’), San Miguel de Allende (6068’), Querétaro (6160’), Toluca (8793’), Cuernavaca, Taxco, and Puebla. The one rail connection was from Mexico City (7349’) to Mexico’s second city of Guadalajara (5092’); we took the popular overnight sleeper.

I only recently found out that Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México (National Rail of Mexico), which had been formed when the rail system was nationalized in 1938, was privatized again sixty years later in 1998, and in January 2000, the Mexican government stopped all federal subsidies for passenger rail service, which rapidly disappeared, with one exception, which I’ll discuss shortly. What a loss, but I suppose they felt the bus service would be adequate.

Of course, living in Mexico City for over three weeks we got to know it best, including the Aztec ruins, colonial past, and contemporary life. But a lot has changed. It was hard getting around town then by public transportation, but a few years later I followed the construction of the Metro, which now services all parts of the city.

The summer Spanish language course we had found was at the Universidad Iberoamericana (Ibero-American University), about which we really knew very little. It was at its campus in Churubusco, a neighborhood way in the southern part of the city. Churubusco was a quite modern area, with contemporary-style private middle-class homes near the university. After the placement exam, I expected to be in the advanced class, since I’d been studying Spanish for so long. I was hoping for the best for Beverly, since she had been doing home study in Spanish with me, and I remember us both being very happy when she turned out to be in the clase avanzada as well.

We had asked to stay in a private home, and had a room in the home of a Señora Olvera, which was quite enjoyable. Meals were included, and, as in many countries, the main meal was in the early afternoon. From the beginning, Señora Olvera would join us at the table toward the end of the meal for a chat. We hadn’t expected that, but all in all, after three weeks of chatting with her, we probably had more practice in Spanish conversation than we had in class.

It was a few minutes’ walk between home and the university through the residential neighborhood, and we had noticed before leaving New York that a major street we’d be using in Churubusco was called Avenida de las Torres. “Avenue of the Towers” sounded so grand, that we wondered what sort of towers they could be. Ancient Aztec ruins of some sort? Maybe some towers dating from the colonial period? What could these towers be? All sort of romantic images went through our heads.

When we got to Churubusco, we promptly took a walk along Avenida de las Torres. It was a broad street, with private, detached homes on both sides, and a broad, grassy median down the middle. Along this median were arrayed the towers we had waited to see. They turned out to be steel high-voltage electrical transmission towers. We had a good laugh.

We particularly enjoyed the art class we took. The teacher was an older woman, who invited the class to her home downtown in an old colonial building, then we all went out to dinner. We also took field trips with her, including to the famous Museum of Anthropology, which was then relatively new. It was largely about the Aztecs, Olmecs, and other native civilizations. Outside the museum stands a huge ancient statue of Tláloc, the Aztec god of rain. I remember the art teacher telling us that, when they were first transporting the statue of Tláloc for display in front of the museum, there was a huge, drenching downpour in Mexico City that day.

Although Churubusco was residential, on our walk to and from school each day, there was a tiny tortilla bakery we’d pass. You’d know you were approaching it because of the distinctive corn odor of tortillas, like tortilla chips. I particularly remember that the night before our final exam, I got sick, with a fever. This of course didn’t stop me from going to the final the next day. We walked slowly along, with me having to lean on Beverly’s arm. It was particularly bothersome passing the tortillería. Imagine feeling ill and then taking a deep breath out of a freshly opened bag of Tostitos or Doritos. Anyway, the exam went well for both of us and I was soon OK again.

I mentioned that we didn’t know much about the Universidad Iberoamericana, largely since it wasn’t easy doing research in pre-internet days. It was only when James Lipton was interviewing the Mexican actress Salma Hayek on his Inside the Actor’s Studio that she mentioned that she had attended the UIA, and it was very well-known. This piqued my interest, and after doing some online research I now find that the Universidad Iberoamericana is considered arguably the most prestigious private university in Mexico. Former Mexican President Vicente Fox is also an alumnus.

It seems it was founded in 1943 in a neighborhood near Churubusco, and then moved there in 1962. I was then amazed to read that UIA was destroyed by an earthquake in 1979, just 12 years after we attended it! By 1988 it had moved to Santa Fe, a major business district to the west of the city, an area to which there has been much movement since the 1950’s to avoid congestion and earthquakes. Since there are now a number of campuses, it is now known as Universidad Iberoamericana-Ciudad de México (Ibero-American University-Mexico City). It’s been interesting following its new development.

I am tempted to say that I haven’t been back to Mexico since 1967, although that isn’t technically true. (This is similar to a recent point I made about visiting Middlebury.) On August 30, 2001, on a visit to southern California, including San Diego (Reflections 2001 Series 10) I drove over the border into Tijuana for about a half hour to see its infamous seediness in the downtown area. In fairness, I understand Tijuana has some very nice neighborhoods, and even UIA has a campus there. But that visit was so fleeting that it’s hardly more than a footnote.

Well, an additional footnote about the name of the city, Tijuana, which has three syllables, and derives from a local Indian word. English speakers, however, have their own pronunciation (just like with Ushuaia in the previous Series), and make it four syllables, as though it were Tía Juana, which would be “Aunt Jane”. Actually, it ends up sounding like Tía Wanna. I understand many Southern Californians call it TJ. One more thing—Caesar Salad was invented in the 1920’s in the Hotel César on Avenida Revolución, the main drag.

Mexico: 2007   I will be going back to Mexico again in a couple of weeks, in January, essentially for the first time in four decades (1967-2007). So how did this trip back to Mexico come about? Almost by accident, and then it almost imploded, but I was able to save it, and everything should now work out beautifully.

I have been spending the month of February at my condo in Paradise Lakes near Tampa for a few years now, and had no other plans beyond that this winter either. Then I heard in early 2006 from Eleanor Hardy at the Society of International Railway Travelers of an interesting development. I had been aware for some time of a train known as the American Orient Express. It is a luxury train with vintage coaches that took various trips around the US. I had already been to all of its destinations, so, although it remained on my to-do list, it had low priority. The news from the SIRT was that a new company called GrandLuxe Rail Journeys had bought the American Orient Express and was offering two routes. Summers it would visit US National Parks in the West, which I had seen and which didn’t interest me. But during the winter season, it would take trips from El Paso, right on the Rio Grande (actually starting right across the border in Juárez for technical reasons) going down Mexico’s Copper Canyon, making a few other stops, and ending in Mexico City. It would do this route, either southbound or northbound, all winter long. I promptly signed up.

I wasn’t particularly interested in the intermediate stops. I wanted to see the Copper Canyon, and then revisit Mexico City after four decades. The Copper Canyon is a major destination in the north of Mexico which we had never seen. It cuts in a southwesterly direction, and you can only see it by rail. This is the only remaining passenger rail route in Mexico.

Actually, there were two places Beverly had always wanted to visit. One was the Italian Lakes, and in 2002, after visiting Venice, we visited lakes Maggiore, Garda, Lugano and Como, staying in the town of Como (Reflections 2002 Series 3). The other place she had wanted to see was the Copper Canyon. Unfortunately, she never made it, but now at least I will.

I put the trip together this way, as an add-on to going to Tampa. I’d take sleeping coach accomodations on Amtrak, first the Crescent from New York to New Orleans. I’d stay three nights in New Orleans, to see how it’s recovering, then take the Sunset Limited to El Paso, then this GrandLuxe trip to Mexico City. I’d then fly to Tampa for the month of February, after which I’d take the Silver Star back to New York at the beginning of March. What I essentially would have had was a circular rail trip from New York to Mexico City, broken only by the flight over the Gulf of Mexico. Since the GrandLuxe connection was brand-new, I waited a reasonable amount of time to see if anything would go wrong, then booked all my connections and hotels. Everything would be fine, right?

But then the keystone fell away from this arch I had constructed. Eleanor got the word that the Mexican rail authorities had decided at the last minute that they couldn’t allow more traffic on the Copper Canyon Route, and that would have to be eliminated. I felt bad for GrandLuxe, since they were blindsided. They put together a pitiful replacement, whereby you would fly from San Antonio, Texas, well into Mexico to Monterrey, and then make some stops on the way to Mexico City. It was the best replacement they could do, but really quite inadequate, and I cancelled, which I’m sure many others did, too.

So I had a big week-long hole in the middle of this trip. I decided I really should have been more knowledgeable of what I was doing. I started filling the hole by doing research, which I should have done more of in the first place, rather than being carried away by the preplanned trip on the fancy train. The GrandLuxe had been scheduled to go through the canyon only once (more later on doing it roundtrip). Worse, it would have done it westbound, which is the less desirable direction, since apparently the most attractive part of the canyon is toward the western end, which would have been reached after nightfall in any case, and most especially in January when I was going. It still might have been a good trip, but now appeared less perfect than it had.

The next alternative was a train called the Sierra Madre Express. It, too, has vintage coaches, and offers weeklong trips out of Tuscon, Arizona (again, with the actual train trip starting across the border in Mexico). Interestingly, I now learned, it comes south to the canyon’s western end and makes a round trip in the canyon, with scheduled stops in certain hotels, with tours. This seemed a wiser way to do this trip. But, although the SME leaves frequently, it didn't fit into my schedule.

Anyway, passengers leave Tuscon—by bus—to cross the border some distance away. Once in Mexico, they board the train. It's then pulled south, apparently under the auspices of Ferromex, the major Mexican freight hauler (formed in 1998), first for a day to the canyon’s western end, then up and down the canyon, then back. Ferromex (Ferrocarril Mexicano, or Mexican Rail), along with its predecessor, has been hauling the SME since 1985, including the Copper Canyon route, which Ferromex operates. Since you stay in hotels within the canyon, you stay on the vintage coaches only two nights at the beginning and end, while being schlepped through the boring Sonoran Desert. The SME might be a fine trip, and I’m not knocking it, but why pay all the extra money involved to go through the desert for two nights away from the canyon, when the Mexican train is right there at the canyon doing the same trip? In fairness, I suppose Ferromex schlepps GrandLuxe as well.

I’m convinced that the SME does well because of the fear of far too many Americans of things foreign. They want to be led by the hand across the border and have everything taken care of for them by other Americans, at least on the surface. Of course, they don’t fully realize that it’s a Mexican rail system transporting them, and a Mexican hospitality system feeding, housing, and touring them, all in the name of the SME.

So I dug deeper. When Ferromex got the concession for ChePe (more on that name later), the Copper Canyon route, in 1998, it remodeled the trains, and it remains the only passenger rail route in Mexico, and runs daily. Balderrama Hotels & Tours owns the hotels on the route, operates the diner and bar cars on the trains, and does all the tours off the train. I booked with them in Mexico, will be getting the round-trip rail ride, all the hotels, tours and transfers that they give the SME, and all for 31% of what it would have cost, plus the necessary air connections. Best of all, they do this every day, and each package is for exactly a week, so I was able to fit this seven-day package right into the seven-day hole in my schedule with surgical precision. No other changes were necessary. What luck. Well, luck plus the careful research that got the luck to work.

There is one last interesting travel point involved with this change, the two additional air connections. Los Mochis is the Mexican city on the Pacific that the Copper Canyon trip starts from, and I needed a connection from El Paso to Los Mochis, and then from Los Mochis to Mexico City afterward. Los Mochis to Mexico City afterward, a two-hour flight, was no problem, but getting from El Paso to Los Mochis in the first place was interesting. See if you can find a solution to this problem.

I foresaw the problem, and suspected its solution, before I checked things out, but see what you make of it. Checking online to fly from El Paso to Los Mochis ended up with a mess. It would involve three stops, with two plane changes, one in Phoenix; but worst of all, the choices would end up as a trip of either 9 ½ hours or 12 ½ hours. The easy solution to this mess involves thinking outside the envelope. Any ideas?

There is a tendency for most Americans to have a blind spot about the Mexican border. Look at many maps of border states, and there will be perhaps the slightest indication—and perhaps not--of the metropolitan area on the opposite side. El Paso, Texas, is a twin city of Juárez, Chihuahua (the state, not the city). Juárez, more formally Ciudad Juárez (Juárez City), is named after Benito Juárez, the “Mexican Lincoln”. My one evening in El Paso I want to walk across the border into Mexico, since I don’t recall ever having walked across a border before.

Anyway, there is a daily flight from Juárez, changing planes once, to Los Mochis. Total time, including layover, is 3h35m. Thinking outside the envelope of the US border, and taking a taxi from El Paso to the Juárez airport, saves the day, in more ways than one.

What would have been a rail trip, with just one flight over the Gulf of Mexico, will now be rail New York to New Orleans to El Paso; a flight; Copper Canyon rail; a flight to Mexico City (five-night visit); a flight to Tampa (one-month stay); rail to New York. Still works for me.