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. 

For many hundreds of miles too, we could see windmills behind these farms as wind power seems to be a big thing out there.

 And of course, there were lots of churches!

Important info.

If you love this blog, subscribe  and share. https://youtu.be/DPalWylCLm0

MORE MEMORIES IN PICTURES

Denver, Colorado as seen from the Rockies at night.

Our Zephyr.

Arid Nevada

Red rocks cover much of Colorado.

My schoolmate and fellow traveler Sonja

Links: 

https://joan-myviews.blogspot.com/2023/08/its-desantis-fault.html?m=1

https://joan-myviews.blogspot.com/2023/08/chicago-born.html

https://joan-myviews.blogspot.com/2023/08/i-love-san-francisco.html

Racism Will Survive Forever in America

As one who lived for a while in the Untied States when racism was totally overt, dangerous and widely acceptable, I have never been overcome by the romantic notion that racism had ever died out there.
What I do know is that it has again become an overt topic since Obama was elected and more so since he was re-elected last week, since the confidence the racists had that they would  have rebounded,  received a serious blow on the 6th November 2012.

What had happened in the past four years was that to be considered polite, one had to do the "politically acceptable" thing and not admit, do or say anything  publicly to indicate that one was living in the past, except of course if one was a proud member of  fringe organisations like the Klu Klux  Klan.

So most white Americans had become  become experts at hiding it, especially the more educated ones. That excludes idiots like Denise Helms from Turlock, California, who posted on Facebook that "Another 4 years of this (N word) ... Maybe he will get assassinated this term,"


When interviewed by the Daily News, Helms said she was not racist!  I put her among the less educated
since not only is she not smart enough to camouflage her obvious racism but also she is an employee at an ice cream parlour, so I assume she is a high school dropout.


I also assme that it is mostly red neck dropouts who  have taken their cue from that idiot Donald Trump   (Trump declared on election night that the US was no longer a democracy!) and have been signing petitions for their states to withdraw from the federation of united states.

According to "We the People" https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions , petitions have come in from Hawaii, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Maine, California, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington etc. 

No one needs to take these seriously however, since for example, the population of Maine is over 1.3 million whereas the red neck petitioners are a mere 1,585. 

Iowa  has a population of 3.06 million while petitioners are 1,483 and that is the general trend.

These red necks  therefore are a tiny, tiny minority and most likely aligned to the klu Klux klan or some other extremist group.

 It is however imperative that the US secret service ups its security, for all it takes is one mad man to change the face of history, but we have to accept that crazy, anti social elements will continue to exist throughout the world as long as this planet is inhabited by humans.