Go east, young woman!

The train station in Portland.

In Portland, I hopped on the Amtrak Empire Builder train and headed to Montana, where I would meet up with my explorer scout group. I'm used to train travel in Europe, but it's a whole different ballgame [football vs. football] in the US. In Europe, you can generally show up five minutes ahead of time, buy your ticket, head out to the platform and say goodbye to your loved ones there, hop on the train, and store all your luggage in the designated area in whichever car you're on. If you reserved a seat, you find it; if you didn't reserve one, you can sit wherever you like.

In the US, riding the train is a bit more like flying. You buy your ticket ahead of time and show up a reasonable amount of time before the train leaves. Shortly before the train arrives, only people with tickets are allowed out onto the platform. And they only have their carry-ons - anything beyond that is checked and unavailable until you reach your destination. There are no reserved seats, but you have to at least get in certain cars according to your destination. While people in Europe use trains for all kinds of travel - commuting, day trips, long-haul - rail in most of the US is mostly used for long, cross-country trips.

My trip from Oregon to Montana was supposed to take about 15 hours, but we sat in Spokane [pronounced "Spo-can" - who knew?!?], Washington, for four hours, waiting for the other half of the train so we could combine for the rest of the trip [the other half had the dining car, but I would've preferred surviving on pre-packaged sandwiches to a four-hour delay]. I spent most of the journey reading, sleeping badly, and entertaining the gregarious little kid in front of me by imitating all his movements, including hitting myself in the face whenever he hit himself in the face. I love getting other people's kids all riled up.

These are a few of the pictures taken on the journey. I took most of them from a quickly moving vehicle, so you'll have to excuse less-than-perfect framing, etc. [Well, that applies to most of my pictures, but at least this time I have an excuse!]

More turbines! Yes!

I was really excited to take the train - partly because I'm so sick of flying, but mostly because I wanted to see the beautiful nature in that part of the country. I wasn't disappointed. There are certainly a lot of ugly, built-up parts of the US, but there's still a lot of really incredibly nature out there, and I'm really glad I got a chance to see it.

Also, people make a big deal about how connected Americans are to technology - and therefore disconnected from each other - just sitting at home, watching TV and surfing the internet. But we drove through one little town - not even a town, just a collection of a couple buildings - and we saw that a bunch of people were waving at us from the stoop of a little hotel thing. The Amtrak employee in our car said, "Yeah, they don't have any TVs, internet, or cell phone reception out here, so every day, twice a day, they're always out there waving at the train going by." How cute and quaint. And kind of sad. But mostly cute and quaint!