Take a Train Trip across the U.S.

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.

I would like to see the USA from the rails. My husband could accompany me and not have to worry about driving. It has been many years since I traveled out west and saw Wall Drug, Deadwood S.D. where my grand mother is buried, the four faces of Mt. Rushmore and yellowstone geysers. My parents first drove me thru there in 1941 to visit relatives in Oregon. They returned to Iowa and went back to Oregon to work in the Shipyards during WW2. I was only 10 when we came back to Iowa after the war. It would be wonderful to re live that trip.