There isn't a train I wouldn't take...

I just got back from a long weekend in Kansas City.  I took the same train (California Zephyr) that I took a year ago to visit family over Christmas, but this time I left from Lamy station instead of Albuquerque.  And I didn't have T texting me the whole way, watching the train's progress via webcam.  I was alone.

For the most part, that works for me.  I like travelling alone.

I settle in my seat, spread my stuff into surrounding areas and work on solitary pursuits like reading and knitting and crosswords.

If you travel with another person, you have the advantage of leaving your stuff in their custody when you go to the lounge car or the bathroom, but you also have to negotiate the seats:  window or aisle? And, when I flew with D, I always ended up in the middle seat. (I could see the dismay on the other travelers' faces when we came down the aisle:  "Please, don't let those porkers sit next to me!!!")

I did miss T's virtual presence, which didn't require seat negotiations and kept me company, but I was otherwise happy with my lot.  It's a beautiful ride, up north and east through Las Vegas and Raton, into Colorado along the old Santa Fe trail, and across Kansas during the dark hours, where the moon illuminates the prairie and the lights of empty towns and solitary farms flash by to the click of the rails and dopplering of train whistles.

The train parallels
The fabled Santa Fe trail;
A dusty dirt road.

I love train rides, but
They don't stop for photo ops.
Still, I do my best.

My knitting has progressed to the point where I can watch scenery while I work.  Right now I'm knitting baby booties for K:  her baby is due in March.  I actually have 4 projects going:  the booties, 2 belated Christmas presents, and the top I started after my knitting bag was stolen from my car last summer, along with an almost-completed year-long project.

Crafty car burglars

Steal my unfinished knitting.

It will not fit them.

(I'm still pissed about that.)

This is how I used to travel.  When I first moved out west, I took my violin, a trunk, a suitcase, and a daypack.  I spent a lot of time in the lounge car, and I still wonder what happened to Lane Turner, an 18-year-old who was en route to California.  We watched Wyoming go by, and I asked him how many people joked about his name (too many, but it's why I still remember it.)

When I traveled through Sweden with A, I was knitting a green sweater with a horizontal white stripe.  I think S has it?  I learned that a dollar bill is exactly 6 inches long, so I used that to measure my progress. Meanwhile, A read and got a kick out of the 10-year-old boy reading Animorphs:  he was so typical.

I remember my first European train trip, right after I graduated from college.  B and I each had a Eurail pass, and we spent a lot of time sleeping in the 6-person carriages.  I remember traveling through Switzerland, being kissed by a young Iranian with no English.  (He had the wrong idea.)  I remember that B had her tripod strapped across the top of her frame pack, and it stuck out just far enough that she had to wrestle it along the narrow aisles.  My in-frame pack was easier to manage on trains, but harder on the back for the long hauls to the hostels. I remember how great it was to pull out the seats and actually stretch out to sleep.  I remember climbing into an upper berth, the ceiling inches away.  I was shuddering with claustrophobia.  I remember the beautiful trip through Norway, from Oslo ferry to Bergen:  they stopped at the peak for pictures, and then we followed a silver-grey fjord to the coast.  But the seats were wooden and upright and on the way back we ran out of Norwegian Kroner and were starving until we reached the ferry buffet.  I remember taking the train out to Helsingor:  B traveled with Gastarbeiter in the smoking car, the air of which was literally blue.

I don't know about Europe, but in the U.S. you can no longer smoke on board, and that has hugely improved the trip.  I remember passing through the smoking cars to get to the lounge:  the fug clung to my hair and stuffed up my nose in just a few short seconds.  And the lounge car always had smoke on one level, which migrated to the other level.

There are other changes.  20 years after my first European trip, I took a train through England, Wales, and Scotland and discovered, to my dismay, that I could no longer leave my packs in the stations while I explored the cities.  Curse those terrorist bombers!  Because I was moving from mountains to coast to flat-lands to mountains again over the course of a month, I had two huge packs, loaded onto wheels.  They jounced along the cobbles, and I had to constantly monitor the upper pack, which had a tendency to fall off. I wheeled those packs through cathedrals, along narrow climbing streets, into crowded restaurants, and over the gap unto the trains.  I knew I was no longer a 20-something traveler when the lads with ear and nose piercings helped me with my bags and called me ma'am.  They had a vested interest in helping me - I was holding up the line - but I think they were raised right, too.

I'm trying to remember how many train rides I've taken.  While I rented a car through Australia, I also took the train down the Sunshine coast and up into the Blue Mountains.  Same with traveling through England and Ireland, Italy and France. There was always some point where I left companions and cars and made my way alone, on the train.  And, I often took the plane into Chicago, during Christmas, visited friends there, and then took the train down to my family.

Usually I travel coach, but I've discovered the beauty of the sleeper.  You can shower and stretch out, and your ticket includes the dining car meals and morning newspaper.  When I was traveling from Italy to France, I set aside 4000 lira to upgrade to a sleeper, but couldn't find it, so I had to sleep in a very crowded carriage.  I had this tendency to stash money in different bags and pockets so if I was robbed I had a fighting chance of saving some of it.  But then I'd forget where I'd put it.  I found the lira when I was unpacking back in the States and mailed it out to my friend A, who had hosted me in Rome and still had several months left on her Fullbright.  It was approximately $70 at that time, I think.

So, I've only experienced the sleeper once.  Back in early 2000, I took a package deal:  fly out to North Carolina to see my cousin's master's thesis (an art installation) and train back via DC (E and M), Chicago, family in downstate IL (N's high school graduation), and then along the Lewis and Clark trail back to PDX.  I traveled coach the first legs....somewhere between DC and Chicago they had to take a drunk off the train.  How cliche is that?  But it was an anomaly,  too.  Usually the folks on the train are socially acceptable. *

I had a sleeper for the last part of the trip, and if I had the money, that's what I'd do now.   I have discovered that, while my brain is still 22 in terms of planning and executing my trips, my body no longer bounces back as it once did.  My back does better now, but I just get exhausted.   It's time to be an adult:  lose the backpacks and travel in comfort.

In addition to logistical changes, I have also discovered that, without companions, I tend to not interact so much with my fellow travelers.  I don't know how much of that is due to the ever-present virtual communication, though.  As I pass through the carriages, everyone who is not sleeping is nose-deep into the electronics.  Even in the lounge car, people watch the scenery, earbuds insulating them from the conversations around them.

And I am guilty too.  I text with friends, post pix and haiku to Facebook, check my e-mail.  In the past, I journaled during the train rides.  I don't know which is better, to share as you go, or to introspect.  Years later, I'm still reading those journals.  Will I still be checking my Facebook entries?  Probably not.

Still, I find that travel is when I do my best thinking.  During that trip to NC, I was dating 2 men, and I didn't know that I wanted to date either of them.  I used the trip to escape them and figure myself out.  It didn't work:  they both phoned me incessantly, and I still remember lying in my berth, watching the moon rise over the snowy Dakota fields while I talked with K and told him I missed him, and then talked with D and told him I missed him too.  And it was true in both cases, but what I really missed was my self-respect and comfortable life.  I still miss those things.

*Addendum:
Shortly after I wrote this blog, one of the friends I visited in DC posted the following to Facebook. I guess my DC drunk was not such an anomaly after all:

E: "I am a Roman numeral carved in plastic," said the poet sitting next to me on the train.

M: I think I'd avoid that car next time.

E: No, he was pleasant and random.

C: Which numeral? V? C?

E: He was fixated on 7-11 and 6th and H. When I could make out what he was saying.

M: Well, at least that was better than sitting in a train on a NM/CO run, and having a fellow come up the aisle announcing to all that there was a bomb on the train. (About 4 years ago, as I recall.) I think we made record time to the next stop, at which the police were waiting for him. There was no bomb.....But he was certainly disconcerting to be around.

Refgoddess: M-, I've taken that route twice....you have all the fun!

M: You may call it fun. It was even worse for the people who had been in the club car...this nut case said he had heard a couple of guys say they had placed the bomb there and then they got off the train at, I think it was Trinidad...those folks were herded back to our cars.....I don't know if he was on something, or if he was schizo but ....well, it was an adventure. We made it to La Junta almost an hour early. No dawdling on that stretch!