The curves are so pronounced you can look out one window and see the front of the train curving away into the distance and turn around and look out the other side to see the back of the train snaking along another curve. Our train ascended the Rockies in a series of entirely improbable switchbacks. After three days we took the Zephyr west once more. Two evenings in a row, as the sun set against the glaciers, we came back to our hotel in the quaint mountain town of Estes Park and watched as herds of gigantic elk calmly walked across the street and over to the public golf course to graze. There, we hiked, drove along the highest paved road in America – nearly 12,000ft, through a fierce glacial landscape above the tree line – and picnicked in alpine meadows, with yellow flowers shining under postcard-blue skies. We arrived in Denver five hours late, rented a car, and headed up to the Rocky Mountain National Park. Kids sit on porches and call out to the passing train. Families wading or fishing in the rivers look up to wave. The scenery gets more epic with each mile further west that you travel - you feel that you ought to be able to reach out and touch the land. You see the forests trying to reclaim the rails, rivers just waiting to flood the line. Unlike a multi-lane freeway, the width of which buffers the landscape, and seals you off from the passing scenery, on a train you see the land encroaching right up to the tracks below. Somehow, the country rushes by train windows in a very different way to how it passes you by in a moving car. 'You see the land encroaching right up to the tracks. There's a camaraderie that, in other circumstances, could be grating on a train, it's a perfect adornment to the trip. They tell you who they are, why they're on a train – there's an element of having to justify the eccentricity, whether it be a fear of flying, a love of train minutiae, or simply a desire for something different. On a train, unlike a bus or plane, everybody wants to talk. It was a tiny castle on wheels, a place we could show the kids DVDs on the laptop, listen to music, stretch out our legs and read books. Then from DC to Chicago we had a family room, a little cubicle which, magically, had space for four pull-down beds. This had made up just the first leg of our homeward journey. While I've travelled around Europe and India by train, here in the US I'd never taken the rails further than the New York-DC route. Unlike a plane delay, which is guaranteed to send my blood pressure toward the danger zone, on a train the long hold-up seemed irrelevant – just more time to enjoy the unwinding scenery. We are also five hours behind schedule, owing to a night time stop near Omaha while the track ahead of us was repaired. ![]() Billions upon billions of ears of corn, endless miles of soy plants. We are travelling through western Nebraska, on the California Zephyr from Chicago, America's great farm belt stretching out behind us. There were round bales of hay in browned summer fields, and cattle grazing on gently rolling countryside. Outside, the early morning sun was just starting to rise over the prairie cornfields. It was a jarring start to an otherwise beautiful day. I sat up suddenly, forgetting I was crammed into the top bunk, and smacked my head into the ceiling. My daughter was sleeping in the bunk below, my wife and toddler son slumbering side-by-side in a similar roomette across the hallway. Earlier this morning, my alarm, set to 5.30am in order to give me time to shower and get to the breakfast car before the morning rush, had woken me from a deep sleep. Now, we are heading back home, on a leisurely week-long jaunt, returning from Washington DC to Sacramento, California. The first part took us by 10 days by road from west to east. We are halfway across the continent on the second part of our road and rail trip.
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