Twenty two minutes of darkness crosses the greatest defensive barrier since 1066.

The TGV whispers through the French countryside, putting 320 kilometers of bleached farmland behind it every hour, before winding through the gorges, churches and villages of the Swabian Alps.

A slow motion dawn in a foreign country, what’s the time, what’s the currency, “passport please”.

The heat shimmers off of a parked oil car and into the hazy afternoon sky, above tanned hillsides and red-tiled roofs.

Uniformed women wave flags at decrepit railway stations in front of halfhearted graffiti.

Young men toss beer cans off of an unused freight platform.

Heads hang out windows, a trail of cigarette smoke left behind under a full moon as the train rumbles through the Serbian countryside, whistling past signals and farmhouses in the warmth of a summer night.

Conversations, laughter, and smiles from new foreign friends in six bunk couchettes.

A dog barks in the distance, as a car crosses the track to enter a driveway, and lightning bolts spark from catenary wires.

Quick! Pull your body back inside to dodge a branch, a tower, a train.

“Train? No train.”

“Why?” was by far the most common question I was asked, when it came to explaining my journey over the last three days. It takes longer, and is more expensive, to travel by train than it is to sell out to the high octane fantasy marketed by Easyjet and Ryanair.

Interestingly, none of the other travelers I met on the train asked this question. While no one else was doing as lengthy a journey as I was, there was a mutual understanding of why it would be an acceptable, even desirable trip.

My journey had six legs:

London to Paris; Paris to Munich; Munich to Zagreb (night); Zagreb to Belgrade; Belgrade to Sofia (night); and Sofia to Istanbul (night).

Every train was delayed (honorable mention to the TGV from Paris to Munich for only being 10 minutes late — they apologized for it in German so many times over the intercom). There was the ominous halt from 250 km/hr to 0 in a ditch in the English (only half of the Channel Tunnel was operational that morning after a maintenance vehicle got stuck in the middle of it.) Then there were the expected two, three hour delays in Eastern Europe, the long border control stops in the early morning.

I really enjoy gazing out the windows of moving vehicles. Watching the countryside roll past is what I imagine flipping through the channels on a television must be to others, pure hypnosis, a trancelike experience. Furthermore, for me, it is very connected to intensely emotional introspection.

There’s this idea that I’ve been working on since last summer, when I spent two hours every day glued to a window along I-280.

On every leg of my trip, I recorded at least a minute or two of the view from the window, be it farmland in rolling hills, farmland in rolling hills, farmland in rolling hills (okay, only the first day and a half consisted entirely of farmland in rolling hills), tiny towns, or huge concrete Soviet constructions.

At some point, I’m going to try to edit these together into a video that can give an overview of the impression created by gazing out of a window for three days. It was originally my intention to have this ready to show with this blog post, but that turned out to be entirely impractical. I describe the project here, so that one of you may hold me to this — video editing is not my favorite task, nor one I feel particularly skilled with, but I want to make this project happen.

The experience peaked on the Belgrade to Sofia route, where as night fell and my fellow passengers inspected the sorry state of couchette car — two of the beds were seemingly broken, to borrow the words of my roommate, “why does this smell so much like dog?”, the holes in the sheets — all expected, all taken as simply part of the journey. Struggling with the extremely strange German man in our room to open the window (he later put on a VM Ware t-shirt, which explained everything), the entire train car filled with the warm breeze of the Serbian night.

Passengers took to the corridor, and as we talked about where we had come from and where we were going, as I felt the wind through my hair (there were warnings printed in the Cyrillic alphabet, presumably against sticking body parts out the window, but I didn’t care and neither did the other tourists who saw decapitation on a Serbian train as its own kind of reward), as the train lumbered and rumbled through old tracks and old buildings, as I saw the moon flitting between trees, I realized, and said out loud, “I’ve never traveled any way that quite felt like this feels now.”

And that, is why.