California Zephyr

I grew up in northern Ohio, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts for grad school, and then to Washington D.C. to work. I traveled to California on occasion but usually on business.

In 2004 we moved to Montara (just north of Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco), taking a month-long, meandering trip across the country by car. That trip opened my eyes to the virtues of land travel. Flying, think, is like time travel. The trip itself is eventless, contextless. Nothing happens. You don’t *travel* so much as appear at your destination.

Traveling by car is different. The trip is part of the trip. Maybe even the most memorable part. Things happen. You meet people, you see new, unexpected things. A trip without ground travel may not even be a trip at all, just a bunch of destinations strung together in any order.

A few years after we moved to California I thought I’d try train travel. My two daughters and I bought tickets on the Amtrak. The train was called the California Zephyr. It doesn’t follow the highway so much as cut across California.

If you grew up with the beach-front “California” in your head from movies and books and all the rest or have visited San Francisco, Los Angeles, or San Diego and only hung out in their touristy areas, cutting across the middle of California is like visiting some other world.

I realize now that most Californians live in that other world.