Trip home. Day 1. California Zephyr to Chicago.

June 14, 2014, 8:21pm

It is the first day of our long journey home. We are in the Amtrak train California Zephyr heading in to Chicago. This ride is a little bit more than 2 full days, so we still have the whole day and a half ahead. 

The train is not full, not at all overcrowded. We have coach seats located at the upper deck. Seats were reserved, but not assigned by numbers. Our friend Oleg brought us to the station in Emeryville, which is about 50 minutes drive from our former home. Since we were very concerned about getting good seats, we came more than an hour too early. There was literally nothing at that train station, but just the one good thing - a cafe serving our favorite coffee in US, Peet's. We like it much more than Starbucks though I suppose mostly not for the coffee, but because they play classical music there and the interior is a little bit old-style. 

So, about the train. As we boarded, we were the first. We picked up some places nicely located by the window and later even moved to other seats, closer to the observation deck. Observation deck is a car, where the seats are facing big panoramic windows. They are not so comfortable, so you don't feel like spending there your whole trip, but it is nice to go there from time to time to enjoy the landscape. At some point we passed the Lake Tahoe region. We were too far away from the lake itself, but saw some beautiful rivers and the rafters in them. Part of the road there are mountains around, sometimes empty fields with only green squares maintained by the watering systems on the wheels. Also we pass some small towns or just settlements of several houses from time to time. 

The seats are comfortable, you can lean the back as in the airplane but much more, there are also foot supports of two types - one on the seat in front of you, another is being pulled up from under your seat and makes the seating part itself longer, so that you can almost lie there. Overall, it's better than I expected. The train is not especially clean, just as the trains in Russia are, which means that the visible parts are clean, but as soon as you look somewhere where you normally shouldn't pay your attention at, you see that it wasn't touched for ages. There are enough restrooms, you don't ever have to wait in line. 

There is also a dining car, but we do'nt go there since we like always brought enough of our own snacks. 

It reminds to some point on our journey by ferry to Alaska, but not exactly. There since people had much more place to walk around, the atmosphere was somehow more social, people walked around all the time and talked to each other. Here we didn't make any real conversations yet. Let's see how it goes further.