I just recently completed the mid-country route, from Charleston, through Washington DC, through Chicago, to San Francisco, via the waist of the nation.

If you do it, I suggest a sleeper car if you are anything but young and very determined. Sleeping isn’t so easy as long stretches of the tracks are very bumpy and the train tends to speed through sections of Nebraska and Iowa.

You will be spectacularly rewarded, however, with the views through Colorado, particularly the Rockies, with stunning vistas of rocky outcrops, gorges and rivers, and also of the Sierra, where you careen past Donner Lake and have top-of-the-mountain surveys.

Fun, if somewhat tiring. I look forward to someday taking the route along the north of the country, through Wyoming, etc.