Riding the Rails: Day 1 Addendum

A couple things I forgot to mention about the train ride up to San Jose:

• Somewhere past Santa Barbara but still in view of the coast, there was a pen with some grazing horses, and, were those llamas? Alpacas? Or was I just looking at them from an odd angle? Their heads looked too small proportionally to be equine, and their necks a little too long. Either way, they were just hanging out with their horses, neither too disturbed by the other.
• My seatmate Jim told me about an incident on his ride down where the train just stopped in the middle of nowhere. No station, nothing. Apparently some asshole had been trying to put the mack on some woman without either noticing or caring that she would rather eat glass than have anything to do with him. Finally she complained to a conductor (I probably would have kneed him in the groin first, but who knows), and they radioed ahead and the police met them, well, in the middle of nowhere, escorting the asshole off the train.