Joan, my views: Hitting the tracks.

My love of trains comes from the days when I used to have to frequent that form of transportation to go home on weekends, after moving from Malvern, St. Elizabeth to Kingston.

I took the train every Saturday from Kingston to Balaclava in Northern St. Elizabeth, where my father would pick me up and drive me home.

I am still nostalgic about those days but alas, Jamaica does not have a good all Island rail service anymore😡.

So, wherever I go, I still grab every opportunity to ride the rails when I have the time.

(Joan, my views: LYMING IN UTAH (joan-myviews.blogspot.com)

Joan, my views: Riding the rails (joan-myviews.blogspot.com)

Even the little street cars in San Francisco 😁.

These little cable cars have been chugging up the hills of San Francisco for 150 years and they are still working.

The longest trip I have ever taken though, is recently on the Amtrak Zephyr from San Francisco to Chicago, over a two-day period.

The distance is almost 2000 miles and the scenery is simply stunning.

The Colorado River accompanied us for 238 miles.

We were joined by a large party of Mennonites in Grand Junction, Colorado. Their dress is distinctive.The women all wear similar hair ties. The men wear suspenders and most have long beards.

They hail from Pennsylvania and speak their own language, a dialect practiced over the years, made up of words and phrases from Dutch, German, and English.

It is only an oral language, I was told.

One member of the group told me they were vacationing and had visited towns in Indiana and Colorado and were heading to Naperville in Illinois, one stop before ours in Chicago.

The journey was so memorable and the scenery so unforgettable, that I found myself feeling sad when we drew into the Chicago terminal, though over two hours late.

Our quiet, comfortable Zenith.

Inside the viewing car.

That delay was caused by a problem with cargo trains in Nevada, for apparently, they have priority on the tracks.

During the entire journey, I found myself longing for the day when technology can take us to the point where one can simply look at something and our eyes take photos! For the beauty of this world is beyond verbal description and even the scenes we managed to capture as we went along, cannot do them justice.

California and Colorado are super beautiful. Nevada being mainly desert, is not so great but it has attracted a lot of movies over the years. Maybe it's because it has so many wild horses.

However, I only saw 4 or 5 as we crossed that state. They were quenching their thirst by a small creek.

Utah is quite attractive too but not to the same extent as Colorado.

We descended from the mountains with their magnificent trees, beautiful deep valleys and gorges and rivers wending beside us into the plains of Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Omaha, where the scenery changed totally from mountains and valleys to neatly laid out irrigated farms.