I'm generally not this patient...

Someone asked me the other day for a general description of what riding these long-haul trains is like. And since one person (could possibly have been my mom) asked, that means EVERYONE IN THE WORLD wants to know.

First of all, it's less boring than it seems like it should be. I think this is probably because I had no particular destination and the point of the trip was largely the train ride itself, but still--I haven't really been bored on the trains at all. You end up framing a long trip (my longest rides have been just short of 30 hours) based on certain things you'll do over the course of the day. Like, okay, in a few hours I'll go grab some dinner in the cafe car, then I'll sit there for a while and drink a beer and see if anyone interesting is around to talk to, and then I'll come back to my seat, read for a while or watch a movie and then I'll try and sleep. That sequence then goes by pretty quickly.

And maybe this is also because this hasn't been a destination-oriented trip, but I have spent retarded amounts of time staring out the window and taking pictures. I woke up around 7 in the morning when we stopped in Denver, and didn't really do anything else but stare until I stopped in Glenwood Springs seven hours later. I don't know what happened.

The downsides tend to be the people in your car who can't modulate the volume of their voice, or just think that everyone should hear what they have to say. These are inevitably the people who have nothing to say whatsoever. There was a woman sitting behind me yesterday who had astonishingly loud phone conversations, the last of which before she got off somewhere in Georgia consisted of multiple repetitions of "Jane, I just love riding the train, it's so PEACEful!" There wasn't a hint of irony in her screams.

Anyway, the delivery may be awful, but she's kind of right. It's a nice way to travel when you're not pressed for time. Or showers. My sister is about to pick me up in Alexandria and I'm on the tail end of a three-day shower-free run. My six-month-old niece will not be the smelly one in the car.