Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
gear down sufficiently to enjoy the train, whether they're really
in a hurry or not.
For most people, though, all it takes to enjoy a long-distance
train trip is a simple attitude adjustment before starting out. Just
remember that the train is part of your whole vacation experi-
ence; the plane is nothing more than the fastest way to get there.
On the Coast Starlight, en route from Los Angeles to Seattle,
you roll almost silently through the Cascade Mountains of Ore-
gon on a single track cut through the wilderness. (You'll notice
that long-distance trains are traditionally given names as well as
numbers—a nice touch, don't you think?) Heading east out of
Seattle on the Empire Builder, you fall asleep in the Cascades
and wake up the next morning in the Rockies as the train skirts
Glacier National Park. The Lake Shore Limited takes you along
the banks of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, and the Adirondack
follows the Hudson River into New York City. If you want to
gaze on some of the prettiest country views anywhere, ride the
Cardinal across the Blue Ridge Mountains from Virginia into
Kentucky.
Just out of El Paso on the Sunset Limited, you pass a teenage
boy sitting bareback on his horse and wonder if he's as curious
about you as you are about him. From the California Zephyr,
just west of Burlington, Iowa, you see a man and a woman sit-
ting with their arms around each other on a tractor in a field of
corn that stretches to the horizon. On the City of New Orleans,
you pass a man putting tar paper on the roof of a shed and, as
he straightens and stares, you can tell that his back hurts. As you
roll slowly through a South Carolina town on the Silver Meteor,
you see an elderly woman tending a small vegetable garden in her
backyard. Her tomatoes are ripe. Twenty-four hours on a train
will yield not only a thousand mental snapshots of America and
its people but also the time to savor them.
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