Post by Owen on Oct 8, 2020 11:29:38 GMT
1 ~~~ A Coast-to-Coast Train Trip Restored My Faith in Travel ~ Conde Nast Traveler ~~~
www.cntraveler.com/story/a-coast-to-coast-train-trip-restored-my-faith-in-travel ~ 30 September 2020 ~
During a cross-country train trip in the time of the coronavirus, Richard Morgan takes a look at America and finds lots to be hopeful about.
First came my friends' skepticism: Why on earth would I take a train from New York City to Los Angeles during a pandemic? Wouldn't a flight be safer? Cheaper? A better use of my time? But then, almost always, they'd soften and start confessing that they'd always wanted to do a cross-country train ride too.
Since March I've spent most of my time camped out in my Brooklyn apartment, socially distancing like the rest of the country. Sometimes just plain distancing, nothing social about it. I knew I couldn't really fly anywhere, but I ached for an adventure beyond staycations or day trips or cabins upstate. Enough dreams have been dashed by this awful year. I wanted to make a dream come true.
So, to visit family, I boarded a train in New York's Penn Station one Friday afternoon this summer. On a Monday morning some 3,224 miles, 13 states, 64 hours, and one transfer in Chicago later, I disembarked at Los Angeles's Union Station. I saw Mennonites—the men in straw hats and suspenders, the women in bonnets—board in Indiana and alight in New Mexico. They had no cell phones but plenty of neck pillows. In Iowa I watched a tortoise trundle along the train tracks. I met Runyonesque characters, most of all Ken, my socially distant neighbor, a college-bound Black man from the tiny Virginian community of King George. He brushed away locks of his blond 'fro as he doodled the words Los Angeles in his notebook with a yellow highlighter. “Every station stop is progress,” he said, the most optimistic line of 2020.
www.cntraveler.com/story/a-coast-to-coast-train-trip-restored-my-faith-in-travel ~ 30 September 2020 ~