Amtrak across the USA

• Fencermatt's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Seattle

Trip Start Jun 12, 2007 Previous
Entry Trip End Nov 13, 2007 Next
Entry

  Seattle, Washington, United States
Saturday, June 2, 2007

Before I set out for New York I have gone back to Seattle for a couple of weeks to visit my family.  A plane ticket from Chicago to Seattle costs about $125 on Southwest and the flight takes about four hours.  So why the heck did I choose to pay more so that I could spend 46 hours on a train to do the same trip?

Reason one: 11AM, 6/1/07 somewhere on the North Dakota/Montana border.   I am sitting in the observation car watching the plains roll by.  Hills, rivers, the occasional house or cow.  All of a sudden, one of the other passengers pulls out an autoharp and another one gets out a mandolin.  For the next two hours they sit there playing old bluegrass tunes as we roll across the middle of America.  There are two older Amish couples sitting in the car and, on a couple of songs, they sing along in German. I can not imagine a more fun, more relaxing and more quintesentially American moment than this.

Reason two:  The Amish.  By this I don't mean the Amish in general but just these two older couples who were travelling together (the same ones from reason one) out to the Grand Canyon.  These people were having so much fun that just listening to them made me smile the whole two days, despite the fact that I couldn't understand anything they said.  They spend all day, both days sitting in the observation car looking for wildlife.  One old man would see a deer and yell 'DEER!' and then the other one would grab his huge and fancy binoculars and look for the deer.  Then all four of them would talk excitedly about the deer they just saw.  They did this for every bit of wildlife between Chicago and Seattle.  'HAWK!' 'BIG HORN SHEEP!'  The bighorn sheep was such a big deal they were still talking about it the next day.  They even extended this excitement to all the exceptionally beautiful natural sites on the trip.  'WATERFALL!'  'MOUNTAIN!'  'SUNSET!' 'SUNRISE!'

Reason three:  America is Fucking Gorgeous and well worth travelling through instead of over.  Maybe I've been living in flat'n'boring Illinois too long, but I even found North Dakota to be strikingly beautiful.  If any of y'all ever get the chance, take a train trip across the USA (quick, before Amtrak goes belly up!).  It is well worth it.

Print this entry Share Seattle hotels

Previous Entry Next Entry