80 Days in America

(To read the first part about yesterday, click here)

The first time I woke up in the morning it was still dark and I had a huge pain in the back of laying in a wrong position. So I changed my position and tried to fall asleep again. Although the seats are really nice during the day, sleeping in this train is a nightmare. During the day the pain in my back went away again fortunately. When I woke up for the second time the sun was rising and I was surprised by a beautiful wide landscape, we were in Texas. There were wide open fields, sometimes some trees or cows or an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. Like I said before, this country is huge! When you’re in Texas, you can look for miles and miles far, it is so stretched out. During the day the view became wider and wider till we were going through big deserts. This was really the landscape that I expected and what you know from old western-movies.

I continued doing some study, topics of today were photography and again webdesign. Train rides make me smarter 😉 It was a relaxed day like yesterday: sightseeing, reading / studying, watching movies and talking to some other passengers. Around dinertime we arrived at El Paso where we had a short break. It was extremely warm outside, but the air was dry in opposite of New Orleans, so it was a bit more comfortable. At the station there was a Mexican woman selling burrito’s for two dollars, that was a nice cheap and good diner. Once the rumor went through the train that you could buy burrito’s outside almost everyone went to the station to get some food. I think Amtrak didn’t sell so many diners today. From El Paso we entered in the state New Mexico, but the landscape was quite the same as in Texas, long wide outstretched desserts with mountains at the horizon. I found it interesting that from time to time you saw some small houses in the middle of nowhere. I can’t imagine how it would be to live there with nothing around you but nature. I wonder what those people would do for a living. It must be a complete different life than as we know it. It’s a nice experience to ride through all this nature where almost no one lives.

The best experience of the day was around sunset. The conductor allowed us to open a window downstairs to take some pictures of the sunset behind the mountains. It was such an incredible feeling to feel the warm summer wind blowing in your face while hanging out of the window of the train. I took some nice pictures, this was really one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen. The whole sky was colored, it was a lovely scenery. After the sunset there was lightning all night long which was also beautiful to watch from the train. This was really a beautiful day full of sightseeing, I really enjoyed this train ride.