![]() Denver, the start of my journey, is a fast growing city. The fastest growing major city in the USA - this could be due to the fact they legalised the use of marijuana. It has a diverse makeup, but is still mainly white with only 5% black, 18% Hispanic, 1% Native American and 3% Asian in the metro area. Some of the housing here is very expensive, with suburbs with houses price tags all over $1 million and according to a neighbour “ it is not the kind of neighbourhood where you have sheds” - mainly because everyone has enormous garages and basements. They are also the suburbs where the irrigation pops up every night to water your lawn during the hot summers with most days over 30 degrees. (Obviously nobody in these suburbs is concerned with water conservation). ![]() Which leads me to the Colorado Museum which looks at the history of the region and the challenges it now faces. Despite the historic disaster of the dust bowl created here after intensive farming was introduced around WW2 and the challenge of getting enough water into Denver, it is not stopping the development of large subdivisions and the creation of lots of new satellite towns. At the moment there are two very large reservoirs to the West, in the middle of the Rockies and water is pumped from there into Denver. There are some major problems with this. This first issue is that the residents of the Rockies, where the water is stored, are increasingly concerned that their water is being taken - especially in areas that have had droughts in recent years. The second issue is that the snow is melting earlier and there is increasing concern that the water won’t last out summer in the future. This is exacerbated by the pine beetle which is killing the pine forests and causing the snow to melt even faster. ![]() I caught the Amtrak California Zephyr train from the beautifully revamped Union Station to San Francisco at 7:15am. This was to be a long journey! Thirty three hours on the train, so I booked a “roomette” - a room with seats, and bunk. It also meant I got fed and watered on the journey and had access to a shower. In the morning the cabin attendant made fresh coffee and supplied lots of juice etc for you. I was really glad I had done this as it was good as the bed was surprisingly comfortable and the roomette was quite roomy for one. It was noticeable that almost all the attendants I saw on the train, were black, and from Chicago. However there were not very many African Americans travelling in the cabins and roomettes. It turned out dining was “community style”, in other words when you turned up to the dining car, you got put with other random people. Sometimes this was more successful than others! However one (quite long) lunch I had a great meal with the famous Ernie Watts (if you don’t know who he is, ask Mr Google) and his wife and a probation officer on holiday from San Francisco. It was really interesting hearing about the US justice system and music scene. Leaving Denver, you journey into the Rockies and have have some excellent views looking back over the plains. This first part of the journey, about 480km is everything I had expected; lots of high snow covered mountains, the rapids of the Colorado river and heaps of pine forests - though some of these had great swathes of dead trees presumably due to the pine beetle. What was surprising, was the large number of farms and settlements, I had never imagined so many people living in the Rockies but we passed town after town (and ski resort after ski resort). I now know why the trip was so long, every time the train passed a town, it slowed to a crawl and blew the horn continuously.
As the day drew to a close, you leave Colorado and enter Utah and my second surprise. I had thought that the Rockies were mountain after mountain but once you get well into the Rockies, there are these enormous (and quite boring) plains. To break the featureless (including vegetation) scenery there were enormous open cast mines, gigantic car parks covered in cars (not always sure where the owners had gone) and occasional oil fields (not as impressive looking as I thought they would have been) Luckily you travel through a lot of these in darkness, including crossing into Nevada. As the mountains become less majestic, you move into California with orchards and market gardening on the plains, then past a WW2 ship graveyard into San Francisco - thirty three hours after I left Denver. After yet another train ride to San Luis Obispo, I met up with ex-Oghs teacher Alison Everett, who spent the next few days educating me about California wines... ~Jeanette Chapman
3 Comments
Linda Miller
9/6/2017 10:11:12 am
I really enjoyed reading about your adventures Jeannette. Perhaps you have a future as a travel writer!
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Bridget
9/6/2017 10:16:39 am
Great photo!
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Jane Smallfield
9/6/2017 01:08:22 pm
Great article Jeanette - I now know who Ernie Watts is!
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