All aboard

I have a love/hate relationship with trains. They are inconvenient, slow and often unpredictable. For the four years I spent up in Montreal, a ten hour train ride was my main way of getting to and from school. I grew to despise Amtrak's Adirondack route. Each time I would suffer through so many stops, hours waiting for customs at the border.  More than once I made the trip on minimal sleep and with a crippling hangover (you'd think I'd learn). 

When I was in Italy, I spent every Saturday at a train station in some tiny overlooked town, leaving what had been my home and my family for the week, only to board a train and start all over again. So often I just wanted to take some time and enjoy where I was and who I was with, to take a little break from the road. 

Now I'm living in Boston, riding subway cars multiple times daily. Each time is  different experience, new people to watch, new conversations to eavesdrop on. At the moment, I find myself on the commuter rail to Providence. What is not normally a pretty view out the window is even bleaker now that the yellow-orange leaves have fallen from the maple trees and only the grungy brown oak leaves are left hanging on.

And yet, it is safe to say my train-love outweighs my train-hate. I'm at home in train stations. They hold a promise of adventure, of stories not yet told. I sit here, rocking to some Jason Mraz (specifically Make it Mine) and I feel like I'm in a movie as the buildings, cars, trees glide past me. I remember a 22 hour trip from San Remo all the way down to Sicily - first a sleeper train to Rome's Termini station, then a 12 hour trip down along the west coast, through Naples, onto a ferry, off a ferry and finally arriving in Acireale, just north of Catania. That train trip showed me a whole country. It was my grand introduction to the summer that would follow. 

Trains are so much more personal than planes. You're down on the ground, you can see life happening. And they're so much more welcoming than buses. Buses compete with traffic, traveling the infrastructural arteries of a place without getting close enough to see the beauty. Even the train to Montreal was a beautiful trip, traveling up through the woods of Vermont along the shores of Lake Champlain. I'd often see blue heron, deer, and bald eagles. In the woods houses were nestled, smoke rising from chimneys. In winter ice fisherman sat rigid in folding chairs on the lake. 

Trains are fascinating. While out the window you can see life as it passes, on the train you can see it up close and personal. You get a real broad slice of people from the area, businesspeople, students, economically disadvantaged, regular joes on the way to the football game, and me. 

Trains make me nostalgic and hopeful and ready for an adventure.