WHY TAKE A TRAIN? - All Aboard: The Complete North American Train Travel Guide - page 2

try, we level everything, carving swaths hundreds of yards wide
across the land from horizon to horizon. When we're through,
there's nothing much left to see. The only conceivable reason
for traveling long distances by car is to save money; that, I'll
argue, is only possible when costs are divided among a number
of passengers.
Flying Really Is for the Birds
Perhaps it's because of deregulation. Maybe it's just the shifting
economic conditions that have caused the airlines to cram more
people into fewer flights. And all the increased security is cer-
tainly a hassle. Whatever the reason, flying is no longer a pleasur-
able experience for the ordinary traveler.
Unless you have the money or enough frequent-flier miles
to fly first-class, you're forced to spend hours crammed into a
narrow seat with virtually no legroom. Once, on a flight to Los
Angeles, I sat next to a rather large woman. She was only mod-
erately overweight, but the seats were so narrow I was forced to
eat my meal left-handed. Add jet lag into the mix, and a cross-
country trip is exhausting. A longer flight—Honolulu to Paris,
for instance—involves back-to-back red-eye flights, an ordeal
from which it takes two or three days to recover. Everyone has
horror stories about the routine discomforts and inconveniences
of flying; yet we have come to tolerate these conditions as an
acceptable trade-off for getting somewhere quickly.
Flying isn't all bad, of course. It's quite true that occasion-
ally—if if you are flying during daylight hours, if you can arrange
a window seat, and if there is no cloud cover—you can see some
pretty spectacular things from a jetliner. Once on a flight out
of Fort Myers, Florida, I had a ringside seat for a space shuttle
launch. No doubt about it: that really was something to see from
25,000 feet.