A few notes on the beginning of a rail journey.

I just went around the entire country via Amtrak.

How it started was this: Ninety minutes into the trip, I unwisely ate a leftover omelette and became violently ill.

I became so sick, in fact, that I spent the overnight hours of the trip vomiting hopelessly into the deep and unclean bowels of an Amtrak train toilet—hours upon hours upon hours—until I was unsure whether I'd ever feel well again.

All that started somewhere past Lawrence, Kansas—well past my last chance to safely bail on the project—and continued into Topeka, then past Newton and Dodge City and Garden City, until finally, finally, somewhere around the Colorado border, I stumbled out of the bathroom and fell into an uneasy half-doze, sprawled across two incorrect seats in the incorrect train car.

It was something like 5:30 AM. Around me in the half-dark: train people. People who were scared of planes or heights. People who craved adventure, or who were not in any particular hurry. Environmentalists and artists and Amish families. People with expired IDs, or no IDs, or who were not eligible for IDs. All of them, it seemed, fast asleep, in various contorted positions, with various assemblages of pillows and blankets.

And, I, in my travel hat, with my backpack and my notebook, was one of them.

A quick synopsis of The Plan

Okay, so, the general idea was to go around the country using public transportation—trains for long-distance travel, and buses for shorter, intra-city trips. I would visit various strategic points, namely Disneyland ("research") and Portland, Oregon (Joy). The important thing was to stick to low-carbon mass transit options. Buses were in. Planes were not.

Such was the plan. Of course, this being America, the plan presented certain challenges. No-fly projects aren't new or particularly interesting material given the state of the climate emergency, but they're considerably easier to carry out in countries with an active, robust, well-connected national rail service.

Bluntly, the US doesn't have proper national rail; we have Amtrak, an outdated railway system which is expensive-ish (especially for sleeper cars), notoriously unreliable, and doesn't even go through my city. For me, the closest feasible hub was Chicago—a full six hours drive away.

In short: Amtrak was far from an ideal option for an extended train trip, but there was no other choice. It was Amtrak, or nothing, so I chose Amtrak, and bought my 3o-day coach pass.

Here was the proposed plan.

Spoiler: It didn't go like this.

But the beginning was promising:

A long walk through downtown Chicago on a perfectly temperate, sunny day. A leisurely sit-down by the river in a plastic deck chair to watch the window washers slide down skyscrapers, methodically pushing their tiny squeegees back and forth. Then excitement at the sight of Union Station, with its cavernous Great Hall and obscenely large American flag and hardwood benches smoothed by the comings and goings of millions of passengers.

Inside the boarding area, each gate spoke its own name (Track 20! Track 20! Track 20!) in constant argument with its neighbor (Track 21! Track 21! Track 21!).

And the Southwest Chief waited patiently on Track 20, and it was on time, and—soon enough—I was on it.

The train, too, once out of Chicago, was full of optimistically-hued light and a healthy sprinkling of empty seats. My own seat was aging, but comfortable, and tilted back to an angle that hinted at the possibility of actual sleep. Plus, I was master of my own window, and my own curtain, as well as two whole electrical outlets, and I didn't have to do a damn thing for the next two days except Be a Traveler.

Even better: In the observation car, the windows stretched around the sides and up to the ceiling, and were full of tiny farms all painted in Van Gogh-golden light. Houses and combines scrolled by at a brisk, reliable pace, and my phone, when I checked it, thought I was driving.

Stupid phone! I was not driving, or doing any other thing that involved concentration. I had only to sit and watch, and this was what I had come for, right?

Of course, all of that was before night set in, before I ate the fated omelette, and before I spent the night curled up on the tiny, rotting vinyl couch in the duplicitously-titled "Lounge" in the deep interior of a train car in the deep interior of the American continent, and wondering: Why? Why? Why?

Which is the thing I always wonder, whenever I venture out of my hobbit hole in Ohio. For someone who loves traveling, I hate traveling. I hate leaving my sweetheart and my desk and my plants. I hate forcing my brain into weird, new patterns. I hate not sleeping, because I never do. I hate all these things so much that my partner now knows to plan for extravagant pre-trip griping. He knows his job is to withstand my repeated wailing of Should I really go? with Yes. Yes. Still yes.

I don't always know why I undertake these travel projects. All I can say is that when I woke up from my miserable first Amtrak night—utterly exhausted and with minimal access to a toothbrush or any kind of privacy—I felt a distinct and specific displeasure with the situation, and I loved that I felt it, and that it felt like something new, and then my answer to Why, as it always is, was Yes.

(A now, a postscript, if you like, of me, sitting miserably in the Amtrak bathroom, in the throes of food poisoning and waiting calmly for death to arrive.)