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.

The particulars:

After an orientation at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, we bus across the Bay Bridge, clamber aboard and find our cabin, Charleston F. It’s not like our bedroom at home yet it has a couch, a chair, a table, a sink, a bathroom and shower and seems larger than Pullman rooms I remember. Charleston was built in 1961 and served on the Union Pacific until Grand Luxe bought it, “tubed it out” and completely rebuilt it. We glide away to the north, following the coast of the San Francisco Bay: it’s fun right away. I tuck my small suitcase under the couch and adventure out into the Rocky Mountain club car for some clubbing with the jolly crowd out there welcoming cocktail hour. We meander up the coast guzzling champagne, munching nuts, and knowing in our heart of hearts that not a single one of us is sufficiently virtuous to deserve this.

Around dinnertime we shunt off onto a siding and snuggle up beside the famous Napa Valley Wine Train, one of tomorrow’s options, although not the one we choose. Instead, next morning the Mrs. and I tour Carneros winery and find ourselves goofy well before the full-bore, multi-wine lunch at Merryvale Vineyards that kiboshes us for the day. No problem: a quick phone call to Esperanza, our butler, to make up the beds, and we burble back into Charleston F mid-afternoon and collapse for the duration. By late afternoon we’ve recovered enough to once again fulfill our weighty responsibilities at cocktail hour: baked hot puffy pastry things, asparagus, and then the five course dinner. Is there such a thing as too much crème brulee? Figure that one out later. For now, sway back to F, off with the clothes and pass out cold as smelts but happy as clams.

And such is each day’s punishing profile for the balance of the journey: one of us up at whenever o’clock to score coffee and muffins from the club car next door, back to bed reading, eating, and small coffee dribbles on the chest, damn. Dress, breakfast (oatmeal tomorrow for sure, but today, eggs benedict), day’s activity (thankfully no more champagne tours). This time, it’s a boat trip on Lake Tahoe, or a hike or photo class, or pottery or horses or the next time we get off, leisure time at Sundance outside Salt Lake City (leisure time for me means relief from the unrelenting eating, drinking and sleeping), or tours of Arches and Canyonlands. All enhancements of the gentle pleasure of simply being on the train.

What do we do in the off hours when not participating in the various activities, drinking and fooding? For the most part, absolutely nothing. Oh, we read some and talk a lot, mostly about other people on the train of course. But real lethargy, and I’m talking about hard core, get down, staring, loose-tether indolence here, is for me the best part of the trip. I mean, if you’re lying snug in your cabin peering out the capacious window at the passing backyards, cars, bars, enormous landscape, and watchers watching you back, are you doing something? My opinion is that you are. You can’t count it and put it in the bank but it is, as a friend once said of mushroom hunting, a pleasantly shiftless activity, faintly hypnotic.

And if that’s not enough for you then wander back to the club car for a little fellowship, or up into the dome where you’ll find like-minded people passing the day and regarding the countryside as it slips gently by. Anyway, you’re doing lots of things by not doing anything. You’re absorbing the rhythmic double click of wheels on rails, you’re watching the tripled locomotives curl the train through a right hand bend along the Colorado River, you’re gimballing against the comforting pull and lurch of 21 cars working their way east across the landscape, and you’re smiling back at rail buffs who are feeling completely at one with themselves, and very fulfilled. Activity is all very fine, but the spirit of the train is much like the spirit of the front porch, chummy and slow. So relax, have fun, that’s what you’re here for.

I’d do it again in a minute.