"All across the nation, such a strange vibration"

I've shamelessly stolen the title from the song 'San Francisco' by Scott McKenzie, but I think it sums up this whole post perfectly, so you can skip reading the rest and just look at the photos.

After the mooting competition had finished I boarded Amtrak's Capitol Limited train from Washington DC up to Chicago to catch the California Zephyr from there onto San Francisco.



And (pardon the French), bloody amazing it was too. My American flatmate was sceptical about how interesting it would be, but he was very wrong indeed. I knew America was a big country, but I didn't quite appreciate that it was such a huge country. In total I was on the train from 4:50pm on Sunday to 8:00pm on Wednesday and the landscape never stopped changing. We passed through wooded hills, fields and fields of corn, deserts, and mountains. It wasn't unusual to be on one sort of terrain one minute only to be on another a minute later such that we'd never know what to expect when we got off to stretch our legs. The desert turned out to be freezing on more than one occasion and the mountains unseasonably warm only half-an-hour past a buzzing ski resort. I sat behind a German from Chicago onwards and he summed it up perfectly when he said that although it was boring at times, he was never bored.

I don't really like just dumping photos, but unfortunately I didn't keep a diary of what was what, so I'm left with a chronological list of photos from anywhere in the DC area, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. So it's the best I can do:
















My favourite picture though has to go to this quick snap: Who on earth calls a town 'No Name'?!


The train itself was a two-storey brute of a thing, but I was lucky to have two seats to myself from Chicago onwards which allowed me some freedom to contort myself in an effort to get to sleep. Unfortunately I only figured out the best way on the final night after observing the guy on my left, but better late then never. The staff were all so friendly as well, and I think by the end of the trip the guy in the buffet car knew everyone by name! It was great meeting all sorts of people as well, older people wanting to see their country (presumably before it was too late!), families travelling together and people just commuting between 'local' stops.

People complain that some American's have no comprehension of the outside world, but having spent four days travelling across the country, I can see why - there's no need. By train, in four days from here I can be in places as diverse as Russia, the Middle East, or probably even China and India. The train passed towns in Utah that were so far from anywhere that they literally appeared out of, and disappeared back into, the desert or mountains with seemingly no reason for them to be there. There were places that once had populations in the tens of thousands, but now only housed two or three people. I spoke to a guy in Chicago who admitted that he didn't have any neighbours, unless you included the people 25 miles away he'd never met! Some places were so poor as well, I never expected to see such poverty but some towns looked so run down and it seemed the only thing that kept them going was the once-daily train passing through. And that's just it, America is a country of contrasts.

I'd hardly claim to be an expert on the country now, but there's so much more to it than New York and the other big cities. Amtrak's slogan is "Stop the world, I want to get on", but all I could ever think about was how much I wanted to get off in every place we stopped in to see 'small-town America'. I don't even know if 'America' is appropriate as an all-encompassing term, it really is 50 little countries within one big one. And I'd like to get to know them all, but there are quite a few English counties I'd better get acquainted with first.