amtrak, the beautiful.

the trip on the california zephyr, feb 2025

Just over a year ago, I randomly decided to a book a roomette (a compartment with beds) on the Amtrak Texas Eagle route from Chicago to Dallas. I had never travelled overnight on the Amtrak and decided to try it to go home for the holidays. A well-timed companion sale meant that I could take my mom with me for free – who also had an unused Southwest credit, enough to cover airfare for a brief trip to Chicago. We had a good brief stay in Chicago and I managed to upgrade us to a larger bedroom for the train journey (a roomette fits one person comfortably but can be a bit of a squeeze for two people). During the train ride in which we saw a lot of flat prairies (I recommend listening to American Teenager by Ethel Cain as you do this) and single lane highways, our bedroom happened to flood. Water ended up soaking the carpets, but thankfully it didn’t get much worse than that.

Amtrak offered me a single use $250 credit for my troubles. As a routine traveler on the Northeast Regional, a single use credit would not be of much use to me – I book my travels months in advance to take advantage of $20 fares. So, I did the most reasonable thing in that situation – book a trip on the California Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco for February. I spent the winter break giddy with anticipation – I would watch YouTube videos from vloggers about their trip across the country and counted down the days.

By the time of departure, the mood had changed – by this point, it had been two weeks of the new administration enacting a flurry of new policies impacting America’s science agencies. This caused chaos and anxiety across academia and public health in the United States. Everyone was questioning whether they would have a job in a few months. As I waited at Boston Logan for my flight to Chicago, I was texting with my boss about whether an upcoming study session would be cancelled. By the time I had boarded, it had been cancelled.

That day, I browsed the Field Museum in a sort of fugue state. I got a (halal) Chicago style hot dog, I hit up the Trader Joe’s next door, and I decided that the state of the world warranted a dip in the hotel whirlpool – internet warnings about sanitation be damned. The whirlpool was relaxing and I’m happy to report I did not get a skin infection. The next day, I waited at the Amtrak Metropolitan Lounge to board my sleeper and did the thing I do at all travel lounges – take the free food and drinks. I found a secluded spot in the lounge and asked a nearby older woman if I could pray there. Afterwards, she asked me how many times I pray, upon telling her – she said yeah, we all need to pray more.

We headed out of Chicago around 2 in the afternoon and I settled in for the ride. They say that you should spend the first day of the trip settling in because the views are nothing to write home about – lots of flat farmland. My attendant came along and asked if I wanted to set a dinner reservation; knowing that seating was other people, I balked at the idea of eating with strangers and took my meal in my room. I love to make small talk but the idea of doing it over a meal seemed too intimate.

That night, we stopped in Omaha for an extended smoke break – the Omaha station is a 1970s tiny building (known endearingly as Amshacks) that sits next to a larger ornate station that is now home to Omaha’s ABC affiliate. Inside, there was an old-style coffee vending machine that offered coffee for 75 cents – it may have been 11:30 at night, but I had the machine dispense me a French vanilla drink anyways. Between the vintage coffee machine, 70s building and the cold night – the Omaha station seemed like an ideal place to bleed out before you pass the important documents to your partner on the case.

The next day is when the scenery really peaked. After leaving Denver, we climbed into the mountains and snaked through canyons. I had breakfast in the morning and happened to be seated alone and thought I’d take my meals in the dining car from now on. Following breakfast, I made my way to the observation car – where I sat with my little Instax polaroid taking bad photos of the passing scenery. A middle-aged dude sitting next to me saw this and started making conversation; we ended up taking for a good hour or so – a former salesman for Dell, he decided to quit the corporate life and now spends his time travelling. He also mentioned trying to flip a a family farmhouse in rural Tennessee and how the current hot real estate is owning storage properties. Among many other things, we talked about how the younger generation is cooked economically, he mentioned having some hope in RFK Jr removing slop from the American diet (I held my tongue) and talked about the malfeasance of elites generally. Basically, the median American voter – we parted ways shortly after that. I would see him multiple times on the trip and exchange pleasantries, turns out we were close neighbors in our sleeping car.

At lunch, I discovered I was wrong about being alone in the dining room. I was seated with a British couple and a 20 something dude who had gotten on the train at Denver and was getting off at Grand Junction. He was wearing a cowboy hat and was one of 8 children and was working on a fantasy novel. The British couple looked (and I mean this in the most endearing way possible) like they owned a fish and chip shop in Brighton; but of course, the lady worked for the NHS and I forget what the dude did. They were travelling to San Francisco after a week in the United States to see their daughter and her fiancé. They were fascinated by Americanisms and American culture and by the behavior of Donald Trump while admitting that the dude at least voted for Brexit. I would see this couple again the next morning, alongside someone from The Netherlands who had spent the week hiking in Utah and was now headed to an AI research conference in the Bay Area.

The food was good. But I am also the wrong person to ask about this because God has blessed with me a palate of very low standards. I spent my last lunch as we were snaking through the snowcapped mountains of California with a father and son who were visiting from Taiwan, where the father is deployed for the military. They were heading to San Francisco where they would catch a long flight back to Taipei the next day. I talked about this conversation in an article published in STAT this month about making small talk with strangers for public health.

In Sacramento, we were delayed by an hour because a drawbridge got stuck. The person who could reset the bridge lived 90 minutes away and was making his way to the scene. Thankfully, they just did what I assume was the equivalent of turning the bridge on and off and it lowered. We passed what looked like Steinbeck country, fields of lush green farms which soon turned to coastline as we approached Emeryville. Throughout this trip, I had very little service and when I did, I used it to spam my family’s WhatsApp chat with photos. This was a blessing given everything that was going on in the news. I just spent my time looking out the window, admiring the landscape of God’s creation – I tried to space out as much as possible in part because I knew I’d be returning to a chaotic situation as soon as the trip ended.

When I got to San Francisco, I found out that NIH had decided announced a devastating 15% indirect cap – which would devastate universities. That cap has since been blocked in court, but it would be a hallmark of things to come. I can’t say the trip gave me a sense of zen that carried me throughout the year; it did not. I spent a lot of this year alternating between states of freakout and nonchalance. There’s no trip that will magically fix your life; this I learned also from watching Marty Supreme. But travels do teach you lessons and here are few that I learned.

The first is that a negative experience can always lead to be a positive one down the line. Had our bedroom not flooded on the Texas Eagle, I would not have been making the trip on the California Zephyr. Something that I had always wanted to do but assumed would come much later in life, during a more “stable” time period. One thing I heard repeatedly from older people on the train was that this was a lifelong dream of theirs that they are finally fulfilling, and I felt grateful to Allah that I was able to do it, unexpectedly at the age of 31.

The second is that life is as much about the people you meet as much as it is about the things you see. We tend to romanticize being alone with nature, spending time in the elements away from fellow people – as if people are an aberration to the natural world. People can be annoying and all the polemics about the Anthropocene aside, you can learn just as much from other people as you can from quietly observing nature. On this trip, I did both.

Another lesson is to say yes to things. I’m sure this is a lesson in the manosphere literature world (Atomic Habits et al) that I have not yet perused – however it is true. At the start of my train journey, I resolved to just eat in my room because as I said, people can be annoying. But because I was tricked at breakfast into thinking I could get away with eating alone in the dining room – I was put in a position at lunch to eat with others. And what a great turn of events that was.

There are other things I learned about being on a train. One is that the Amish take these trains frequently as their mode of cross-country transportation. Families will spend multiple days cooped up in coach and you’ll see them in the observation deck. Some people do stare I’m sure, but they don’t really seem to let their outward difference impact their ability to enjoy the trip. Another is that the schedule for a train attendant can be kind of grueling. I overheard our attendant telling someone that they do two round trips (or a trip and a half) at a time – each trip is roughly 3 days. You have to be available at all hours of the night just in case – up at 6 am and sometimes don’t get to bed until late at night. Definitely tip your train car attendant. And finally, America is really a beautiful country – the landscape is something we should not only appreciate but preserve and protect. Get out there and see it.

I have been meaning to write about this trip for months but never got the chance to. But waiting has also given me the hindsight of a very chaotic year. Eleven months later, I think I have an even greater appreciation for this trip. Life can throw your curveballs; it can be difficult and hard and there are people out there who thrive on the knowledge that you are in pain. But life also throws you opportunities and what I’ve realized is that they are seldom as obvious as the curveballs – you might not notice them in the moment, and you might overlook them completely. But it’s important to take them, important to do the little things that push you, that require a little more effort and planning, that might involve a bit of a risk. When your life is primed for looking for the opportunities in even in a setback, you’ll be so much happier. Look for the small conversations, look for the landscapes outside your window.

Alhamdulillah for life, Alhamduillah for another year of it.