Lucius Beebe, a journalist, author, and gourmet food critic from the first half of the last century, was tricked into boarding a plane for the first time in his life at the age of 65. Trying to get him to an important meeting across the country, Beebe’s friends got him so intoxicated that he didn’t notice that he was getting on the aircraft. Only after sobering up a bit did Beebe offer this sage plea: “Get me off this flying capsule of death!”
I couldn’t agree more with Beebe’s sentiment. After a few too many flights where pilots sighed, “Well, we made it,” and fellow passengers made the sign of the cross as the wheels finally managed to stick their landing, I knew it was time to find a different way to get around. Because they seemed to succeed where planes failed—with wheels firmly attached to the ground at all times—I began to take trains everywhere I went.
The first few trips I took from D.C. to my hometown of Pittsburgh and back baffled my friends, who couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t just hop on a plane and be home in an hour. Even though I started taking the eight-hour-plus trips because of an irrational fear of flying, I secretly began to love the train itself, despite its aroma of stale bread and smattering of crazy people. On board, you have no WiFi, few chances to plug in any electronics, and rare cell phone reception; in other words, a train is the last venue for utter relaxation that exists in this country today. At some point in the trip, you reach a state of nirvana in which nothing matters except the passing scenery. Simple decisions like turning the page in your book or stretching can take minutes because you’re just that carefree.
If you want to attain that level of chill, your trip has to extend beyond a simple stint from D.C. to New York. Think longer and more illogical—D.C. to Montréal, Chicago to New Orleans, Miami to Maine. The longest trip I’ve taken was four days and three nights from Orlando to Albuquerque by way of D.C., Chicago, and a lot of the West I’d never seen.
To make it through a trip of that length, you can’t romanticize anything about it. You may walk into the long, window-covered dining car with white tablecloths, dinnerware, and flowers on the tables, and think you’ve discovered the last elegant way to travel. You haven’t. The tablecloths are roughly the same material as paper towels and the deceptively fancy dishes are disposable. Unless you can splurge for a sleeper space, nights in coach mean you’ll skirmish with the stranger sleeping next to you for that invaluable window seat and the basic right to not have someone sleeping on your shoulder. Taking the train will only allow you to unwind if you’re the kind of person who can overlook bagged salads and sometimes-unhinged dinner partners for the chance to slowly coil through the Rocky Mountains as a light snow falls outside the windows.
The European college students’ equivalent of “backpacking through Europe” is purchasing a month-long “travel anywhere” Amtrak pass and seeing the country though the small towns, downtowns, and middle-of-nowheres we tend to bypass on the highway or in the sky. After about a hundred hours of travel through the South, Midwest, and Southwest, I arrived in Albuquerque feeling like I’d actually gone somewhere, instead of the disorienting sense of being picked up and plunked down at random by a plane, seeing only sterile airports and the sardine-like interior of a flying tube. I saw marshes in Florida, small towns in Ohio and Indiana, the Chicago skyline, the desolate plains of Kansas, mountains in Colorado, and mesas in New Mexico. I didn’t meet the most glamorous people in the world, but then, I didn’t expect to.
