Panic and peace

Well, our epic Amtrak journey started off in a most unsettling manner. We left our little hostel early in the morning after a cosy day of playing chequers, drinking Montana boutique beer and feasting on huckleberry pie. But amid all this fun, I’d somehow managed to lose our tickets. Slightly worried but confident in the ability of modern ticketing systems to re-issue them without the world coming to a halt, we set off for the station with a spring in our steps.

But on our arrival we were told by the grim-faced attendants that tickets could not be re-issued and if they were indeed lost, the only way out of East Glacier was to buy them all again, all $750 of them. And the train was leaving in 20 minutes.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more ashen-faced, and that’s saying something for a pasty-skinned creature like myself. After turning our bags inside out, Leah and I sprinted the 2kms back to the hostel to turn that inside out too. We eventually found them hidden down the back and around the corner of a sofa. After sprinting back (well, Leah was sprinting, I was shuffling along gasping for air/praying for forgiveness) we found out that the train was late anyway, so the day was saved. A little later we schlepped our bags onboard the train and our adventure had begun.

It sounds a little strange but taking a train across a third of the breadth of the States was incredibly enjoyable. We sped past ghost cities and abandoned houses, across big-sky prairies and misty pine forests, past hundreds of towns with spherical water-tanks with their names painted on them, rising up above the streets like grounded UFO’s.  

Onboard, things were just as eclectic. We shared a row with a grizzled old farming man in denim overalls who barely spoke and clearly preferred to grin. An Indian guy with an entourage of animal fur and feathers gave educational talks in the lounge car and played his hand-made flutes. The Amish people spent hours on a thrilling game called “10,000” – as Leah discovered, the winner is the first person to reach 10,000 by rolling the dice and adding up the numbers. We tried a few times to find Wifi as we rolled through the larger towns, but the only signal we picked up was from a server called “Don’t Fucking Touch It”.

Our destination was Minneapolis and we were booked in for our first couch-surfing experience as a family – staying with two college guys, Kevin and Nick. It was also their first couch-surfing experience, and I think that we are all definitely converts now. Nick spent a lot of time showing us around, and his company was fantastic. We did a whole raft of fun things with him, including seeing theatre at the Minneapolis Fringe (does every town have a fringe these days?) and Bat for Lashes at the Varsity and going tenpin bowling at an organic-vegetarian restaurant.

 On the last night Kevin and Nick and his cousin Briana took us out on the town to Prince’s old club and other riotous places. This is where we learnt about a technique called “baby-birding”: when you feed an under-ager alcohol by taking it in your mouth and, when pretending to kiss them, spitting it into theirs. Not particularly tasty, but apparently necessary when alcohol laws are so strict.

Minneapolis is a great city and this was a complete surprise to me – it’s so much better than what it appeared as viewed from the airport two weeks ago. There are mind-bending cafes, world-class op-shopping and, as Leah and Georgia discovered, punishing, pay-by-donation yoga. Nick and Kevin were generous hosts and we were sad to leave them. Bunking with a local makes a heck lot of difference to visiting a city.

Our next destination was going to be Iowa City, but after finding some incredibly cheap Greyhound tickets to Chicago and absolutely no other transport option that we could stomach going any other way, the decision was made. So here we are in Chicago, Illinois, home of Barack, Kanye, Jerry Springer and Oprah. Lollapalooza finished up last night and since then it’s been tricky finding hostel accommodation, or anyone to couch-surf at such short notice, so we’re staying in a proper 3 star hotel tonight. Hopefully we’ll be on a couch where we belong by tomorrow night.