Santa Barbara Bound!

Note: I wrote this post on the train from San Jose to Santa Barbara. Between everything else, I forgot that I hadn't put it up yet! So it was all written on Wednesday. 

The train to Santa Barbara is perhaps the coolest I have been on. I’m not sure if it is because we have the long route, from Seattle to LAX. There is so much room. The seats are wide and well-padded. There is a foot rest and leg rest build in, and the seats really lean back. There is a whole car that is just huge windows. I’ll try to get pictures on my way back, but this is really cool. I went down to the snack car earlier, but I don't really need food. 

About halfway through the ride, an older woman named Florence started talking to me about her life. Somehow, as most people who want to talk tend to, she got on the subject of her own travel opportunities as a younger woman. She told me all about how, when she was younger, she answered an ad in a sailing magazine. A man was looking for someone to travel with him while he sailed the seven seas. Florence wrote to him, telling him the type of woman he should be looking for when he conducts his interviews. “I never dreamed he’d pick me.  I thought he would have thousands of letters,” she told me. “But I put my daughter’s office address on it and sent it.” Well, of course, a few days later she got a call from her daughter, telling her to “Call the Skipper.” She went on to tell me that he offered to take her with him on his adventures, offered to fly her back every month to see her kids, and she turned it down. She had responsibilities and commitments, she said. She said this guy ended up sailing around the world for seven years; she looked him up recently and found him, and they spoke some more to each other. She passed up the trip of a life time.

All while she was talking, I kept wondering how true the story could be, and if it was, why was she telling it to me? Did she think this was my trip of a lifetime? Was she a lonely old woman? Did she regret not taking this opportunity, although by all means she had a very interesting life anyway (she told me about that, too)? I tried to just listen to her for a while without over analyzing, but it really made me wonder.