“Have a safe flight”, friends and colleagues wished me for my recent trip from Seattle to LA. But I wouldn't be flying, I’d be taking the route less traveled - a 36-hour Amtrak service down the west coast, the Coast Starlight.

 

The Coast Starlight route is heralded for its gorgeous scenery which is where the initial appeal of booking the journey came from. I was already taking a bit of a different approach to this trip, doing a house swap in LA instead of an Airbnb rental, and I thought embracing slower travel to see the American west coast in a unique way would be a great addition to easing into the vacation.

From snowcapped mountains in Washington to the vast crop fields across California, the journey was meditative and a perfect way to wind down from work. Facing out from the observation car, while the world passed by sideways at a leisurely pace, moments were unique and couldn't be revisted. There was a meditative quality to the transitions between nature and cities; from countryside to scrap yards, single story homes to multi story, family business to main street stores, and back again to nature. Equally as meaningful were the unique moments. A truck that was jackknifed off the side of a slopped snowy road late at night, lit by the flashing red lights of emergency vehicles and surrounded by men in yellow jackets. Yards and fields that were swamped from the recent rainfall in California with roads closed from natural floods. People waving at the Amtrak from their cars as we passed them by.

 

But what I wasn’t expecting from the journey was the views were just a backdrop for the real experience - the one shared with the people onboard. I hadn’t planned on socializing much, and I didn’t really, but sitting amongst the conversations of strangers made the journey. I listened a guy in his late 20’s who’d gone through a recent breakup as he taught a stranger how to play solitaire for his future rail trips. A girl in her early thirties struck up conversation with a guy that embodied the vagabonding nature of a train traveler in his open and endlessly curious conversation. She shared a recent family emergency that resulted in a hospital stay and he shared a recent motorbike accident and wrist injury. She later shared with a group after he left at his stop, “people like him are the reason to travel by train”.

An “is this seat free?” question from a soon to retire couple quickly turned to discussions of my time in Ireland, his in Chicago, biking in Utah, and war stories from their time in the military where they met in South Korea. Lunch in the dining carriage turned into conversation with a girl on her trip to London and her brothers’ recent extravagant purchase of a $30k watch to a girlfriend that subsequently left him but went ahead and posted a Rolex unboxing video on her Instagram anyway. A visit to the café for chips turned into a conversation about the server’s last fifteen(!) years spent serving this west coast route, which he favors as it’s the only long distance Amtrak that doesn’t have time zone changes – “changing across three time zones doesn’t work for me” he shared – pride in his voice as he'd worked his way off less desirable routes and made the Coast Starlight route his own.

 

There was something so real about the conversations amongst strangers, whether it was a couple of sentences about the seals they'd seen out the window, or hour-long conversations on why they were onboard and what they were hoping to accomplish with their lives. Friendliness and grace, humanity at its finest. Stepping onto the Coast Starlight was a little top-up for the soul, and I'm looking forward to the return journey.

 

Extra images taken from 15 Photos From the Amtrak Coast Starlight Train | Field Mag