Christo Eliot has written an entertaining new piece for the Cornell Daily Sun about his decision to take a train cross-country. I have a feeling he’ll be flying next time.

Vomit-Induced Perspective

I learned everything I need to know about progress and developed an immense appreciation for the airline industry while bent-over in a Denver-bound Amtrak bathroom, vomiting up my sorry excuse for a dinner at 4 a.m. somewhere in the middle of Nebraska.

My friend Ethan and I had decided that after we finished our Fall semester finals, we would meet up in New York City for a few days and then board a train at Penn Station to begin our railroad odyssey back home to Colorado. I figured cross-country train travel was something you had to try at least once — kind of like eating nothing but canned corn for five straight days just to see what happens, gastrointestinally speaking.

We thought it would be something of an adventure or at least make a decent story; we had these romanticized ideas that the journey would be like stepping back in time — that riding a train would be the fine dining five-course meal equivalent to the greasy, fast-food, microwaved, facon-topped cheeseburger of an airplane.

We weren’t necessarily wrong; it just turns out five courses of sitting in a box on wheels as it slowly rolls across the American countryside in the middle of the night with motion sickness and newly discovered claustrophobia really is not that appealing. And the Wright brothers made a super good double-bacon cheeseburger.

Ethan and I boarded the train late. We had been catching up with a high school classmate of ours who goes to Columbia and lost track of time. Once we had finally made it from the Upper West Side to Penn Station, most of the train’s passengers had already boarded, forcing my friend and me to separate.

I slunk into an aisle seat, pleased with the amount of legroom I was working with, next to a young man who used hair gel pretty liberally and was listening to a heavy house beat at roughly the same volume I would expect in a dingy nightclub. Unfortunately, It soon became clear this was the only song my new travelling companion listened to.