Amtrak Adventures – The Journey of Journeys

This is the travel journal of two British girls travelling across the great expanse of North America. Spending most of that time on very slow trains…

As soon as our 5.40am train pulled out of the station at San Antonio, I crashed out and snoozed my way to 10am. We were on the Texas Eagle/Sunset Limited to Los Angeles and we knew we had at least thirty hours on the train ahead of us. When I woke up the scenery had transformed into desert and shrubland as far as you could see. This, I was reliably informed was the Big Bend National Park. There were vast expanses of intimidating desert and scary looking cacti. Think the landscape of No Country for Old Men. So we scooted off to the observation car so we could get a good look all around us.

Amtrak Adventures – Alamo Antics

This is the travel journal of two British girls travelling across the great expanse of North America. Spending most of that time on very slow trains…

San Antonio, Texas

Excuse the multiple alliteration of the title, I just couldn’t help myself… So we left Fort Worth after a lovely few days making ourselves into cowgirls and jumped back on the Texas Eagle further south into Texas. The train ride was pretty uneventful – except to confirm just how vast the state of Texas is. What seemed to us as a short inter-state journey took as long as crossing several state lines when we’d been further north. We arrived in San Antonio at a reasonable hour but were just so sleepy we headed straight to our motel. We’d been staying in a run of dodgy places so weren’t too keen to clamp eyes on our next one, but this turned out to be a whole lot nicer; clean comfy beds, a clean bathroom and walking distance from the town centre, with (and this really made the room for us) a massive TV.

Amtrak Adventures – Cowboy Land

This is the travel journal of two British girls travelling across the great expanse of North America. Spending most of that time on very slow trains…

Fort Worth, Texas

The train was delayed getting to St. Louis so despite running around the city like nutcases trying to get to the station on time, we really shouldn’t have bothered. Two hours of sitting in a desolate waiting room made us bizarrely keen to jump on the Texas Eagle for another overnight trip.

Arrived in Fort Worth around 2pm and took a taxi to our motel. Our driver was a curious character with long white beard and hair and a car full of junk. He cracked a joke or two (“Are you guys from South Alabama? You don’t sound local.”) and informed us that what he’d seen of British people he didn’t think we were that great. We tried to assure him the whole country wasn’t full of Simon Cowells and Piers Morgans but he didn’t look convinced. His parting shot was that yet again we’d booked ourselves into a motel in Dodgy-ville and he basically told us never to leave the room alone or at night. Yey.