From Shore to Shining Shore

 

In case I haven't mentioned it, I made a long and wonderful trip around the USA ( and part of Canada) just before getting  my myeloma diagnosis. I was away from mid April 2024 till mid June. I had first word about myeloma on 18th June so it was a close run thing.

I had been to the USA for work and family visits over the years but had really only been to the North East, apart from a cross county hitch in 1982. So there were lots of places I hadn't seen, and now I had time and incentive.

So I planned a huge cross country trip in both directions, using the Amtrak train network. This is quite leisurely - much slower than British trains - but you see everything. As you roll through the small towns along the route you get the feeling for what it is like to live out on the Nebraska plains, or among the hog farms of rural Illinois, or in one of the settlements in the dry deserts of West Texas.

Here is the first real Amtrak I caught, from Washington DC up to Chicago, 700 miles over the coastal mountains and out into the midwest. 

I was struck by lots of things on the trains. There were big and really comfortable seats that tilted right back so you could with a bit of planning have a decent night's sleep without getting a cabin. I was surprised there were so many Amish on the trains (I never got on a train without seeing Amish) until I realised how stupid I was being. If you do not fly and do not drive a car, how else will you go to see relatives in other parts of the country? I was also charmed by the way the announcements felt like they had come out of the 1950s. They always called out 'All Aboard!' when they were leaving a station, especially one of our (cough cough) 'Fresh Air Break' stations, when the smokers made a dash for the stairs. The announcements urged you to "be friendly and talk to the people next to you; it's a long trip". I can't imagine ever hearing that on a British train.

I crossed all sorts of lovely bleak and beautiful deserts and prairies. Here are few of them at random.

The cities were in their own different ways a delight too. I've always loved New York but this was the first time I had been to Chicago or San Francisco or New Orleans. They all well lived up to their reputations and I'd go back very happily. 

But there were two highlights that stood out for me as I came across the whole Southern sweep of the States. I spent two days in deep South West Texas in a border town called Del Rio, which was on the Rio Grande river just a bridge away from Mexico. The whole culture was Tex Mex, so Spanish was probably the most common language and everyone was happy and able to speak it. Breakfast was Breakfast Burritos rather than Waffles. And everyone, including me, drove a truck. I had asked for a car, but a truck was all they had. And so, it being Texas, and me driving a truck, I thought I should go down to the local gun range and did, on my last morning there, before spending the afternoon in the hot border town of Acuna, just over the river. And here is the most Texas thing I did.

The other and final highlight, apart from a lovely weekend with my cousins on the Jersey shore just before I left, was to accidentally find myself at a Bluegrass festival up in the mountains of Virginia. I spent most of the time just wandering around the big campsite where people were jamming all night and playing blistering banjo, guitar and mandolin and singing nailed-on five part harmonies. Oh and also passing round the moonshine and the fruit jar (if you know, you know).

The quality of my videos of this event is execrable, but I will try to link one here, just to get a little sense of how glorious it was. And going from Shore to Shining Shore was a real privilege and I would urge anyone else to go and have a try at it.

Bluegrass jam

And for anyone who wants to take a deeper dive into it, when I got back I put together a folder with most of the videos organised chronologically which you should be able to get from here:

Videos  from PG's US Trip April June 2024