How to Plan Your Writing Retreat on Amtrak
Prepare for an adventure. And be ready to write — for real.
Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving. Life is the train, not the station. — Paulo Coelho
“The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn’t really in the whistle — it is in you.” — Meindert DeJong
Have you ever taken a long Amtrak journey?
I’ve taken almost every major Amtrak route in the United States, including traveling cross-country multiple times. In coach, and also in a sleeper. My first journey from Seattle to Syracuse in 1996 happened after a bout of flying phobia (after a horrendous TWA snowstorm landing) and have continued the practice since.
When hearing I was about to travel from Seattle to Boston one time, a friend said wistfully, “train rides make me feel a sweet melancholy.”
