Amtrak: peak transit?
The California Zephyr may be the best way to fly.
Last week I finally did the trip I’ve always wanted to do: spent the $1,200 on an Amtrak sleeper car ticket to go all the way from Chicago to Emeryville (the Bay Area) on a 50-hour excursion by myself. I left on Thursday afternoon and as of writing this on Saturday morning I’m still in my little train car about to reach Reno, Nevada.
Why did I spend so much money to effectively be trapped in a 10x4 foot box over the course of three days, using a communal shower on a bumpy moving vehicle, all with nothing but some books and my own thoughts in a vehicle where wifi doesn’t exist and cell service is spotty at best? Why do we as humans do anything, really?
Even though I’m notoriously lonely (going through a one-sided breakup at the moment?) I am never alone. I have to go to work in an office, I have a roommate, friends are always throwing parties/beach hangs/etc., I have open mics to do, I’ve got rehearsals, let’s not forget softball, and when I’m free on the weekends I go over to the suburbs to see my dad—even when I’m alone I’m not alone long enough to, like, form a complete thought. The thing about being a writer is that you unfortunately need time to just kind of exist in a vacuum, away from it all. And since I don’t drive, long-form public transport is the closest thing I can get to a road trip to clear my head.
I did a little bit of research (really not enough research to justify a $1,200 ticket) and learned that many consider the California Zephyr (Chicago to the San Francisco Bay) to be one of the most beautiful Amtrak routes in the nation. I have a friend in Oakland who said I can stay at their place anytime, and so I was sold. A month before I broke up with a guy who didn’t really consider us dating despite six months of being together and me going to his improv shows, I purchased the ticket on a whim in the morning. I haven’t taken an extended vacation since last summer, I got a lot of writing to do, and my coworker is quitting mid-July. I feel overwhelmed by life, but if I don’t act now I won’t know peace for a long time. A three-day weekend just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Did this trip end up being the little writer’s retreat I wanted it to be? No. Turns out I have the toxic trait called “yapping” and a bitch loves to stare out the window listening to Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree and I did a lot of that.
There’s something about being on a train where time goes by so slow but yet also so fast. On Thursday I was having a quick chat about traveling long-distance via train with a girl traveling from Pittsburgh and suddenly it was 10:00 at night and I didn’t write anything or read any bit of my book. The next day for breakfast I was sat next to this older couple, Steve and Barbara, who were going to Salt Lake City to see their kids and grandkids. Throughout the day, I kept running into them and talking to them because that’s what you do as a normal person on a train. There was also another lady who gave me San Francisco recs and we talked for a while before dinner. And after dinner I wanted to spend a few minutes looking out at the Utah sunset, and started talking to two younger women about public infrastructure. Then it was yet again 10:30 at night. And barely any writing done! Oops!
That’s my problem: it’s so hard for me to lock in when I could just be having fun and being social instead. I’m a writer because I can’t shut the fuck up on the page, but yet I also can’t shut the fuck up in real life, especially after a fat pour of free wine included with the dinner included in the sleeper car package. I swear I need a handler or something. (Author’s note: I’m publishing this a week late because I was having too much fun on my trip and did not want to bother opening the Substack app on my iPad to figure out how to post. And then I’m writing this in the midnight hour before publishing Tuesday morning because I love day drinking over a long weekend.)
But less about my downfall as a writer and more about my experience riding the train! Sure! I got a roomette, which can fit two people and is the smallest of the sleeper cabins you can buy. I was just by myself and I feel like it was enough room to be kind of a slob, just leaving shit sprawled out everywhere, which is how I typically operate. The single’s tax is real, though, because you’re paying by room not by person so I was paying double. From talking to other people who traveled in pairs, the small rooms are a bit of a tight fit. I mostly heard this from old people, who famously love to complain.
The thing about Amtrak is that there’s a fuck ton of boomers. I don’t know why this surprised me—who else has both money and time? Not most people I know that’s for sure. I think overall the old people on the train were reasonable, but there was this diner car mishap that was really the talk of the whole trip and the elderly were just always talking about it. I guess they’re valid in that they were told they could get a patty melt for lunch and suddenly they no longer can do that.
Here’s what happened: we were maybe an hour out of Union Station when we get a notice on the P.A. saying that there’s a mechanical failure in the dining car and the air conditioning is completely blown out, making conditions too bad for cooking or eating. There was no way to get any parts until Denver in the morning (and spoiler alert: they couldn’t fix it then either). It was unfortunate for everyone involved (especially the dining car crew) but they handled it just fine by ordering what they could get on the way for 50-plus sleeper car passengers. The first night we had pizza from somewhere in Iowa (which tasted fine) but the weird random old guy in front of me wouldn’t stop complaining about getting pizza (as opposed to Amtrak’s world-renown hospital food) and also his cat was on cat hospice. He seemed clearly bothered by losing his cat to old age, but was also on a three-week train adventure across the country. He stopped in Omaha in the middle of the night so I never had to speak to him again, thankfully. If you were wondering, in Colorado we got some of the best the United States can offer: Olive Garden.
But here’s where we get to the meat of the trip: the views. They were incredible, breathtaking, beautiful. The star of the show was definitely on day two as we went through the Rockies after stopping in Denver, and day three had some nice landscapes through the desert and Sierra Nevada. Human beings love it when the ground is not flat. Just something about it. People who are not true America-heads love to shit on the first day’s views through Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska, but a true Midwesterner (me) will find the beauty in the Great Plains and the Mississippi River. I’ll say it once and I’ll say it again: Iowa is an underrated beauty.
Out of all the Midwestern states to sleep through, though, I’m glad it was mostly Nebraska. Despite the price of the sleeper car, I did not sleep that well, especially the first night, and kept waking up every time we stopped at a train station. I also woke up at around 4:30 in the morning as the sun was rising, and in a delirious haze looked out the window to see a sight that was so haunting but also maybe one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. We like to joke that Nebraska has nothing going on in it, but I woke up to look out a window and truly see nothing. Just a wide expanse of flat plains and brown dry grass for miles and miles—not a house in sight, just a simple bush-like tree sitting there in the abyss, with the red sunrise peeking from the east looking like a portal to a different dimension. They used to call the Plains “no man’s land” for a reason.
Because I was too sleepy to have any cognitive function I didn’t think to take a picture, and I failed to find anything on Google Images when typing in “southwestern Nebraska” to get even an example remotely close to what I witnessed that morning. One of the draws to riding the Amtrak is that the train goes through places that cars can’t go, seeing sights some people won’t ever see, but nobody talks about the sights of going through an unlivable expanse of land in Nebraska, yet that’s the one I think about the most when I’m alone. I guess you’ll just have to take the trip yourself and make sure to wake up at exactly the time I did to know what the heck I’m talking about.
Also, nobody prepares you for the amount of bare ass you see along the river in Colorado. Everyone’s on a raft and everyone’s ready to drop their pants and moon an entire train containing both women and children as it passes. A tradition that will never die it seems.
Overall, taking the Amtrak across two-thirds of the country in 50-ish hours was a really fun time and I would like to do it again someday soon. Maybe to other parts of the country? There’s so much to see. I will say that traveling alone like this, even though I was spending a lot of time talking to strangers and looking at stuff, I was starting to get a little weird in the head by the morning of day three. It was just me and my thoughts in a metal tube pushing me forward mile by mile. I started writing this when I was on the train and I’m only now publishing it—this post would look a lot different (read: sadder) if I hadn’t let my brain breathe with a little bit of time and some human interaction. I like spending some time by myself, but I definitely will get weird if left alone for too long. Horrible news for my old hag in the woods future at the age of 75.
P.S. Getting home I flew back on a redeye and I would rather spend two days talking to old people and children than have to sit in an airport literally ever.