I’m rolling across the Palouse of eastern Washington State, a mix of sagebrush and wheat fields in thin soil over basalt – land scoured by the great glacial Missoula floods at the end of the last ice age, its former topsoil deposited in my home Willamette Valley and carried out to sea. My conveyance is Amtrak’s Empire Builder – one of the skeletal remnants of a once-vast network of passenger trains. My destination is Minnesota, land of my birth and still the place where I have spent the most years in this lifetime.
Oh, yes. Travel by rail is the best for all the reasons you wrote of. I have only traveled by rail once, but it was such a revelation. I hope to do it again some day.
Oh, yes. Travel by rail is the best for all the reasons you wrote of. I have only traveled by rail once, but it was such a revelation. I hope to do it again some day.