Those Pesky Pirates

5:30 a.m.

I’m sitting on the train, rocketing through the pre-dawn darkness. I can see nothing out the windows — just velvety blackness and my own reflection. I’m having coffee in the cafe car, and although the train allegedly has internet, I’m told that it’s spotty so I’m writing this offline and will cut and paste it into Blogger once we get to Penzance. Of course I left my glasses in our room, so I’m also typing blind! (With greatly enlarged font size, though it will hopefully look normal by the time you see it.)

So far, it’s been a good trip, and I did sleep for a couple of hours at a time in my upper berth. It’s long enough to stretch out and the cabin is surprisingly quiet — just a few creaks and squeaks as we move.

The cabin is ridiculously small, though. Dave and I have just enough room to both stand up next to our berths, and God forbid we need to change clothes or put on shoes. Our elbows and knees go knocking into everything, including each other. It’s a study in economized space, with a sink beneath a tabletop and a closet just deep enough for a single jacket. We barely have room on the floor for our backpacks. It’s a good thing Olga isn’t with us because she’d never fit, although as Dave said, she would have loved it. I guess if we had bigger bags they’d go in a luggage car somewhere.

This train is officially known as the “Night Riviera,” which sounds quite elegant, but I’ve seen no one in evening clothes, drinking champagne or playing baccarat.

(In fact, a guy just came into the cafe car wearing a sweater and an orange toboggan covered with enamel pins of trains. A trainspotter! He’s carrying a camera on a tripod.)

We seem to be moving quite fast, but maybe that’s an illusion. We left Paddington Station (photo above) at 11:45 p.m. By 2:48 a.m., we were here…

…somewhere near Curload, just west of High and Low Ham, and south of Chedzoy, Middlezoy and Westonzoyland. (Henceforth known as “the Zoys,” at least by me.)

After a few more hours, we were here…

…so the tracks are hugging the coast, not following the middle of the Cornish peninsula. Still, I had the sense lying in bed, rumbling along, that we might mistakenly overshoot Penzance and sail right out into the ocean.

Speaking of which, our conductor asked us when we boarded, “are you continuing on from Penzance?” And that gave me pause, because where would we continue to?! “The Isles of Scilly?” she clarified. And now I wish we’d thought to go to the Isles of Scilly.

(The trainspotter just got off in Plymouth.)

The most tedious part of the whole trip so far was sitting around all day yesterday waiting for our train’s departure time. I mostly read “Auntie Mame,” which I am really enjoying. I know the movie well because it’s one of Dave’s favorites, and it’s fun to identify lines in the book that were carried directly into the script. But there are big divergences too. Claude Upson, for example, is much more viciously anti-Semitic in the book, and there is no scene in which the Upsons are victimized by Mame’s modernist furniture. And Agnes Gooch does not belatedly discover that she married Brian O’Bannion in a drunken wedding ceremony — in fact he disappears entirely after impregnating her and she marries a faculty member from Patrick’s school, St. Boniface. And on and on.

8:55 a.m.

And now we're in Penzance, sitting in a waterfront cafe, eating scones fresh from the oven and listening to Elvis Presley sing "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

When we were pulling into the train station, we looked out the window and saw the beach.

"Oh, I didn't know Penzance was on the water!" said Dave.

"Of course it is," I said. "How could there be pirates if it was inland?"

"Butt pirates," said Dave. "And you know someone's made that movie."

We laughed really hard about the Butt Pirates of Penzance, but I'm not going to Google it.