On a whim last week I decided to take the Amtrak train from Olympia to Vancouver, WA to visit my sister, instead of driving down. I can't even remember when I last rode the train, but it sure was a nice, relaxing way to make the trip! I thought I would work along on my iPad during the trip down, but pretty quickly my eyes kept getting drawn to the passing scenery and I put my iPad away and got out my camera instead.
The route south from Olympia to Vancouver looks ENTIRELY different as you travel by train past farms and small towns, and cattle and horses in the fields, and green curtains of trees, and rivers flowing alongside the tracks. I began to feel like I had not only changed my mode of travel but had maybe traveled back in time - just a bit.
And it brought back so many memories of family trips by train to visit grandparents when I was a child - and my excitement that we even got to SLEEP on the train!! And memories of summer evenings when we would go get ice cream cones, head to the train station and then just sit to watch the trains come in. Something about the glimpses of people on the train fueled my imagination about places they might be going - and places I could someday go.
The train's whistle as we approached crossings or stops also brought me right back in time to places I have lived where that train whistle became part and parcel of the memories of that place. Ahhhh nostalgia.
Kind of nice to travel back in time, too, to a way to get from point A to point B where you can show up 10-15 minutes before departure; you don't have to take off your shoes and empty everything in your pockets to be scanned for banned items. You even have enough leg room to stretch out and be comfortable during the trip - how cool is that?
I arrived at the Vancouver station every bit as quickly as I could have driven down - and with pictures on my camera and picture memories in my head. That doesn't seem to happen so much on the freeway in a car. So train traveling....time traveling - I'll be doing that again!
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