Bert Newman

At BoomerCafé, we pride ourselves on being “active baby boomers.” Okay, that’s fine, but writer Bert Newman just took a terrific trip with his wife and asks, “Do we always have to be so active?”

Mae West apparently said that anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. If so, the best place to do that may be on an American train or more particularly, a train my wife and I just took called the Grand Luxe Rail Journey.

Grand Luxe runs rail trips through the prettiest routes in America. They are leisurely and meant to be so. There’s one that visits the National Parks, another that cruises through the Old South, and ours, which took us from the San Francisco Bay Area through the wine country, over the Sierras to Lake Tahoe, east across America’s empty quarter to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, then up the Colorado River through Glenwood Canyon to Denver. Six nights and five days of world class pampering. It is Grand, it is Luxe, and it is great indulgent fun: champagne tastings, guided tours, snug cabins, piano bar, club cars and, punctuating each day, intelligently designed mealtime stuffings. Plus, and this is a big plus for me, the experience of once again eating, sleeping, just being on a train.

All this is accompanied by a sterling cohort of chefs, butlers, wait people, lecturers, hosts, and guides who oversee every facet of our existence while we gently rock, roll and lollygag through Napa and then highball at 80 mph across Nevada and Utah into Colorado. We leave the Bay Area on a Saturday at about 4 p.m. and arrive in Denver the following Thursday night. Somewhere around 1,400 miles in 125 hours; do the math and you’ll see that we weren’t exactly on fire.

Continued

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