68 Hours on the Road (or rather: on the Tracks)

Wednesday, finals week at OU: I have just finished my last essay, and wrote my final exam, but I don’t have any time to relax. I have to be in Seattle on May 1 for my internship, and I decided that I don’t want to fly there. Airports look the same everywhere, and when will I ever have the chance to get a glance at the Midwestern and Northwestern countryside again?

So I decided to take a train. Or to be exact: to take the bus to Cincinnati (3 hours), walk to the other side of town with my 50 pounds of luggage, take the train to Chicago (9 hours) and then take another train to Seattle (46 hours). In case you’re thinking that that sounds a little insane – that’s exactly what I was thinking. I was sure that I would hate myself for my decision at some point of the journey. But to my surprise, that did not happen. In fact, I enjoyed my train ride so much that I was actually a bit sad to exit the train in Seattle (while at the same time looking forward to finally taking a shower again).

The bus ride to Cincinnati did not take long. The weather was nice and I looked out of the window, to gather impressions of Ohio for a last time. What I saw can be summarizing pretty quickly: Churches, dollar stores, trucks, potholes, cows, retirees in golf carts.

At a gas station, I picked up a free magazine with the title story: “10 Tips for a Happy Marriage”. It’s never to early to educate oneself! In case you were wondering, the first tip was to "nurture the spiritual side of marriage": "make it a habit to attend church together, study the Bible together, and pray earnestly and frequently with and for each other". Good to know!

In Cincinnati, I had to walk to the train station, and of course I got lost several times. But if I hadn’t, I would not have asked this pastry chef who worked an overnight shift for help, and he would not have gifted me a freshly baked cookie! In the end, I still made it to the train station in time.

The sightseeing car of the train

I have to admit that I might have been biased against American trains, but I was very pleasantly surprised. You get to check your bags in the beginning, so I did not have to worry about them for the next three days. Everyone is guaranteed a seat, and the leg space even in the coach class would make our beloved Deutsche Bahn green with envy! You also don’t have to spend all the journey in your seat, there is a “sightseeing lounge car” with huge windows, a cafe and of course the dining car. I had brought 3 books with me, but I ended up only reading one of them, and spent most of the time looking out of the sightseeing windows and tracing how the landscapes changed over time. In the sightseeing car, there was also a very friendly atmosphere, and it was easy to get into conversations with strangers. I talked to an artist, for example, who passed the time by drinking vodka out of a one liter water bottle, and to a female forest fire fighter, who told me all about controlled fires.

The sunrise over North Dakota

We rode through Wisconsin, where I saw mainly puddles, cows and lumber mills. And an astounding number of scrap yards. Then we crossed the Mississippi river into Minnesota and rode along the water until the sun went down. I did sleep surprisingly well and woke up, when the sun rose again and illuminated the prairie of North Dakota, which is as flat as if God shaved every unevenness off with his holy razor. 

The magazine rack in the train station in Minot, ND

Even the one-story houses seemed to duck down as if they wanted to hide. We crossed one fallow, muddy field after another. After another. After another. What stood out the most were the enormous silver silos, glistening in the morning sun. I fell asleep again, and two hours later, the landscape had already changed again. There were some hills now, and I saw rusty oil pumps. A lot of oil pumps, pumping slowly and steadily, no human beings were in sight. 

Then, the hills got steeper, and stonier and furrowed by the weather. Some looked like enormous scruffy feet. Just one more step, and they could crush our tiny train under their rough soles. Yes, these are the kinds of thoughts coming to one’s mind after spending the first 24 hours on a train!

Somewhere in North Dakota

Then we crossed Montana, in one almost straight line, which took around 12 hours itself. A lot of the houses in the small towns and in the country side seemed abandoned. Sometimes, I looked out of the windows and did not see any signs of human life for a few hours at a time, besides maybe from a few wooden fences - about to collapse or already collapsed. When I saw a lonely farm house in the middle of nowhere, I tried to imagine how living there must feel. I spent all my life in places that were shaped and governed by their human inhabitants, but here, in the middle of Montana, it suddenly felt like humans were only a footnote of the story.

Somewhere in Montana

The scenic highlight of the train ride was without any doubt the Glacier National Park in Montana. Snow-capped peaks, thick fir tree forests, crystal clear streams in the valleys. Suddenly, the sightseeing car was filled with retirees, excited chatter and camera shutter sounds. Many said that they had never seen anything comparable in their lives.

When we left the National Park, the sun already went down again. I overslept Idaho, and when I woke up, we were in Washington! That meant, that it was time for me

Somewhere in Washington

to pack up my stuff and get ready for the next adventure: the city of Seattle.