AMTRAK
Two weeks ago today I contracted Covid, then felt miserable and numb for two weeks thinking it would never go away. But then on Thursday I came back to life and now a day later it suddenly feels like it was weeks ago that I was sick. The world has returned to normal and except for a cough I am back to where I was two weeks ago.
This morning on Apple News I happened on a story in the Christian Science Monitor on the growing popularity of train travel in the United States. The article brings back the great fun I had for an entire month as I circled the United States.
There were three parts about the trip that were special for me and they were interconnected. The first, it turns out was meeting the people I had talked into letting me stay with for days at a time and having them show me around. Most of these people I didn’t know well before and now they are friends. I didn’t know how reconnecting with people, sometimes after 60 years, would be. But reconnecting was the best part of the trip. The second best part was exploring new places from Glacier Park to Bellingham, Washington, to San Francisco, to Santa Cruze and Monterey, to Los Angeles and finally New Orleans. Mostly I was shown around by friends but sometimes I had to find my own way. Exploring the West Coast and getting a feel for West Coast life was great fun.
But the final special part were the days and nights on Amtrak itself, even the 52 hour ride sleeping in a reclining chair from Los Angeles to New Orleans. The seats were wide and comfortable and easy to sleep in, the tray made a little desk and an electric outlet let me plug in my iPads and iPhone. But best of all was the wide window that let me get a feel for how huge and how varied the United States is from Washington, DC along three borders of the United States and back to Greenville, SC. On a plane you can look down from far above but get no sense of what the landscape is like. For the first time I got a sense of how much of the Southwest is endless miles of scrub desert. For two long days and nights nothing changed. Without irrigation everything was brown and withered. Finally I felt what the drought in the West means.
I was not always comfortable, but was always pretty comfortable. And I really enjoyed being able to sit and read or write or process photographs or talk with people and all the time being able to look out the windows. There was a lounge car where I could sit and a snack bar. In this case the trip was certainly the destination.
The food was not always good, but I stocked up at each stop and brought my sandwiches along with me. The reason I bought the Amtrak ticket on a whim was the idea of being able to sit for hours and look out the window and that is exactly what I did. I didn’t really mind being late much of the time. It really didn’t matter how long each leg of the trip took except when I arrived in New Orleans at 3 in the morning instead of 11 or Greenville six hours late with my son waiting all night to pick me up. But inside the train I didn’t care. I was even pleased that we never went faster than 80 miles an hour and often much slower. The slower we went the more I could see. And though I was trying to avoid Covid by always wearing a mask, I am grateful that the virus held off until I was home a day and could spend two weeks here, rather than in some distant city, recuperating.
So here is the link to the Christian Science Monitor story, I traveled twice as far and had just as good a time as the people in the story. I have plenty of Amtrak points saved up and am looking forward to my next Amtrak trip. I recommend the train to anyone who reads this.
https://apple.news/ATIGdPvxmSsqDjF-eGZJSVQ.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 