When I wake up this morning, our Texas Eagle train has already left Texas and we are about to leave Missouri as well. We are just arriving in St. Louis and crossing the Mississippi to Illinois. I've ridden this route before on the way out to Fort Worth. There was nothing to be done but backtrack a bit along the same route to get to the Pacific. At least I don't have to go all the way back to Chicago, just as far as Springfield in Illinois. My train left Fort Worth two hours late. I would have missed my connection in Springfield. But overnight the Texas Eagle made up so much time that I still have time at Springfield if it goes on from there. The nice thing about traveling with Amtrak is that you are never left to your own devices, but there are always staff there who round up all travelers and guide them to the right departure platform. You have to be very stupid here to get lost. There are also not many connections, so everything is clearer than in German rail traffic.
This is the third time I'm crossing the Mississippi. This time heading west again from Illinois and now I'm rolling through Iowa, the 12th state on this trip.
So far I have already traveled to the following states on this journey:
- Massachusetts
- Rhode Island
- Connecticut
- New York
- Pennsylvania
- Ohio
- Indiana
- Illinois
- Missouri
- Arkansas
- Texas
- Iowa
After 3000 kilometers driven, this sluggish, deadly boring automatic transmission of my car annoys me. Only now do I realize how important the experience of self-efficacy and the possibilities of expression of a manual transmission are for me.
Today begins the last day of my road trip through Texas. The Austin South Park Hotel is the nicest hotel I've stayed in in Texas - but also the most expensive. It took a bit of fiddling to stow all the purchases of the last few days in my only medium-sized suitcase. Because I bought a pair of cowboy boots in Amarillo, I now have to put my heavy hiking boots in my suitcase. They take up a lot of space. Also, yesterday I bought a large cool box for my brother at outdoor mall Cabela's. This is now my new hand luggage and replaces my backpack. Now the backpack has to be stowed away in the suitcase, too. Luckily, the cooler bag is the right size for me to fit my laptop in, upright and diagonally. And my narrow file folder with my documents also fits in. It's a nice coincidence that I now inevitably carry this cool bag with me, because I'll need some travel provisions for the next few days. Today I'm going to switch from car to train again and travel more than four days to the north-west corner of the USA. That's why I bought a lot of tin cans in the supermarket. I had small water bottles stashed in the trunk of my rental car at the beginning of my road trip and there are still a lot left.
Driving past three dozen proper burger joints and Mexican restaurants in San Antonio to grab a $17 "Texan Pizza" at 46th Street New York Style Pizzeria is the worst idea I can remember having on this trip to have. What a muck!