So, after a final, very Chicago meal of Deep Dish Pizza (tastes good, but nutritionally I imagine is something like standard pizza2), I stayed a final night in the (rather excellent, all told) Chicacgo Hostel, and headed to the train, to be confined in a moving metal box for approximately 43 hours.
Now, I had really enjoyed my time on the train up to now, but it's difficult to compare even 22 hours to almost two days in such an environment. Turns out, however, that I had no more difficulty on this trip than any of the previous legs.
The key, I think, to enjoying a long train trip such as this lies in good preparation and a positive attitude. You wouldn't want to just step onto the train like you were going to work in the morning. I burned through the end of one book and most of another, as well as almost exhausting a fully charged Ipod battery. The other issue was gonna be eating. After trying the dining car on the trip between Boston and Chicago (I had a very boring, rather expensive burger and chips) I decided that wasn't the way to go. Instead I ate before I got on, and in Albuquerque, where an hour's stopover allowed us the opportunity to get off and have a quick meal. Also in Chicago and Albuquerque, I bought a sandwich and drink to stand in for another meal.Breakfast came from the cafe car, which is far cheaper than the dining car, and snacks were courtesy of a box of granola bars in my carry-on luggage. As that rather long description might suggest, it's certainly possible to travel such a long distance without relying on an expensive dining car, but it takes a fair amount of pre-planning.
One unpleasant and one pleasant surprise presented itself upon boarding the train. Unlike in my previous two trips (but like on the way from LA to San Francisco), there weren't power points next to the seat on my car (other cars did, but I guess I was in an older model). While it did mean that I couldn't spend my entire trip playing Simcity 2000, it lead me to the observation car, a very pleasant surprise. Decked out with extra large windows which curve up almost to the roof, the observation car has benches, comfortable swivelly seats and, downstairs, the cafe car (Along with the coach cars where my seat was, the observation car was a double-decker). This proved the best place to just sit and admire the scenery as it passed - something which took up almost as much of my 43 hours as anything else.
Of course, I say 43 hours, but that wasn't, in fact, the amount of time the trip took. Despite a couple of delays totalling probably 45 minutes to an hour of delay (one caused by a failed switch engine ahead of us, the other caused by some kind of mechnical failure in one of our locomotives), we actually pulled into Union Station, Los Angeles about an hour early. So make that 42 hours.
Over the course of those 42 hours, we travelled through 8 states, and nearly as many type of terrain and scenery. We left Illinois in the middle of a snowstorm, and travelled through snowbound farms and praries until we hit Iowa, which is dead centre of corn country (lots of grain elevators by the sides of the track), but no grain in the middle of winter. It was dark by the time we crossed the Mississippi River, but Kansas City, Missouri (go figure - it's actually on the border, and there's a Kansas City just across the way) was a welcome change in scenery. I slept through the majority of Kansas , and woke up in a new timezone (Mountain Time) and a new state (Colorado). Colorado was perhaps snowiest of all, and certainly rockier and higher than any of the other places we traversed (Raton Pass is 7834 feet above sea level). On the other side of the pass we hit New Mexico, and suddenly it wasn't snowy anymore - instead, we had clear skies, scruffy pasture land and spectacular hills and rock formations. After passing through Las Vegas, NM (somewhat less popular than its sister city in Nevada), an hour-long stop in Albuquerque meant that, as well as getting some lunch, I could spend just a little while poking around the largest city in the state of New Mexico.
After watching a spectacular sunset over the mesas of New Mexico, I had something of an early night, and slept so well that I more or less missed Arizona ( it was dark anyway, and the night was made somewhat longer by another early morning timezone change, from Mountain to Pacific). Once we hit California, it was all home stretch - the couple of hours from San Bernadino to Los Angeles seemed like nothing.
Arriving at about 7:20, I collected my bags and took the special shuttle bus from Union Station to LAX airport. My motel is right down the road, but it was too early to head out there, so I waited in the terminal for a couple of hours, then took their complementary shuttle back here, where, after a couple of days, I am well and truly grateful for a big bed, my own shower, wireless internet and a change of clothes.
My plane leaves Los Angeles airport just before 2 tomorrow, with stopovers in Taipei and Brisbane before I end up back home. As I've said, once I do get back, I'm gonna write up a bit of a summary post, but that mightn't be for a few days.
Until then, for the last time from the USA,
Jono
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