My Big Fat Midwestern Train Journey

I'm trying to cut my airplane travel. This is hard, because I make the journey from my current home in Minneapolis to my parents' place in Denver four times a year or so, and these trips are probably the last thing I am willing to eliminate in my attempt to cut my carbon footprint. In the past, I've been working full-time, and thus I've had extremely limited vacation time, so plane travel was almost a necessity to make the trip worth the effort and expense... Now that I'm in grad school, though, I've got a LOT more time (this is the absolute BEST thing about being in school), so I figured I could afford to start taking more time-consuming forms of travel.

As Jim Kunstler has pointed out, America is really, REALLY big; WHY on earth aren't we paying more attention to the imminent demise of the airline industry, and re-investing in our rail system??? My parents and I took the train from Denver to New York City in 1999, not because it was cheaper than air travel (it wasn't, and we didn't even get a sleeper), but because we'd always wanted to take the train somewhere. And it was pleasant enough, but fraught with the kind of inconveniences that would deter 90% of everyone, especially people on a tight schedule. For example, our train was approximately eight hours late into NYC; apparently, this was because Amtrak was having disputes with freight rail companies over right-of-way, and our train kept getting diverted to the side tracks where it sat completely stationary for hours at a time while coal trains rambled past. This was during the World Series between the Yankees and the Mets. The Amtrak employee running the snack bar had tickets to the game the evening we were supposed to arrive, and he missed it entirely, by a good number of hours...he was so mad that he gave away all the snack bar's food for free. So, given that it took the better part of three days to get there, and the timing was completely unreliable, I can't imagine that the majority of people would ever willingly choose such a mode of travel over planes.

But I've had exceedingly pleasant train experiences as well—though not in this country. In 2005, a friend and I spent three weeks in China. We took the train all over the country, from Hong Kong to Beijing, hitting eight other cities in between. Looking back on this trip, I think the train journeys were my favorite part. They were LONG—some of them over 24 hours (China is a BIG country), which ate up some of our travel time, but also provided a much-needed respite from the otherwise constant action of our adventure. We booked beds in the open sleeper bunks—second class, essentially—where we shared an entire car with bunk-fulls of other travelers. Most fortunately, my friend spoke fluent Mandarin and Cantonese, so she was able to converse with all of our fellow travelers and learn all about their lives, and we had a great time swaping stories and passing around the scarf I was knitting for my dad, which the Chinese women, it seemed, couldn't wait to take a crack at. It was just pleasant all around—clean, friendly, affordable, and best of all, on-time. I honestly can't imagine NOT choosing the Chinese train over airplane travel, given the difference in price, not to mention the opportunity to watch the (fascinating and beautiful) countryside go by. If only American trains could be like that...

So, upon learning that my winter break would be an incredible FIVE WEEKS LONG, I went onto the Amtrak website to find out how one might get to Denver from Minneapolis on the train and discovered that it was actually quite difficult: I could either take a THREE DAY journey west from Minneapolis, through the Dakotas and Montana to Seattle, then down the west coast to San Fransisco, and east to Denver (which would undoubtedly be a beautiful journey, but a bit long for my tastes); or, I could take the train to Chicago and then southwest to Denver, but I'd have an overnight layover in Chicago. Neither of these really struck my fancy...but I realized that I have friends I can visit along the way and in Chicago, and a rambling, slow-paced cross-country train journey might be just what I needed to top off my fabulous, month-long winter vacation.

So I flew home, but booked a one-way train ticket back (thanks to Amtrak's multi-city fare finder), and tomorrow I will be leaving Denver on the train and heading to Omaha to visit my college roommate and her husband. I'll stay there for a few days, then move on to Chicago for a few days to visit some other friends, and then head back to Minneapolis from there. It will be slow-paced and, I hope, relaxing. I suspect it will be much less-stressful than airplane travel (knock on wood). I haven't exactly been pressed for relaxation over the past few weeks of my break, but even so, having the opportunity to kick back for 8+ hours between cities with nothing to distract me from my reading or knitting sounds fabulous. And it will be nice to have some sort of connection to place—a sense of what lies between me and my destination (besides corn), an alternative concept of space to that of the near-instantaneous movement from A to B that I've been experiencing for the past...well, forever. I don't want to overly romanticize a world characterized by slow movement—air travel has had its distinct benefits (like its ability to open up far-flung places to people of average Western means, like me), but as long as we're headed in the direction of limited air travel (and I truly believe that we are), we might as well focus on what we've lost by making it possible to rush across thousands of miles of landscape without a second thought as to what we're missing in between.

Though it does seem to me that with the enormous expanses that we must cover out here, west of Ohio or so, train travel will never be an appealing option to anyone on a tight schedule. This is yet another unfortunate aspect of the measly two-to-three weeks vacation that most Americans get—it makes any sort of slow-paced vacation or travel totally unappealing. I wouldn't have considered a multi-day trip back to Minneapolis if I didn't have the time to spare. So, while I hate to wish underemployment upon anyone, I suspect that a lot of us are going to have a bit more time on our hands in the future than we do now...and I can't help but think that a little bit more travel of the old-fashioned, laid-back, slow-paced variety will do us some good.