Anna is my guardian angel, who drove me to the hospital after my accident near Moab. Later after we realized we should talk about business more in-depth, she gave me a lift back to California, Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The environment is inspiring; sitting in a park of the Stanford University to scratch an idea, passing the headquarter of Google when driving to the cinema, looking around in the gelateria if you can see the founder of Apple or Facebook who live in the neighborhood. An ambience of infinite chances, wishes and hopes. Some of them dreams, some of them reality. The theatre remains dark and the audience seated until the last line of the credits passed the screen. Hollywood is near and everyone knows someone who knows someone, who… I enjoyed the local introduction into what’s for me an all American life, where everything seems possible, underlined by the impression that every aspect of life has a price tag. Everything available? Pah! Did you know that they have stores here in which they don’t sell Coca Cola, Pepsi or Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper? Truly I was shocked, there are even two of these horrible shops around here. When all you need after a devastating business meeting is an injection of caffeine and you’re hobbling into one of the only two stores of all of America where they sell meat of cows who were hugged before they were shot. Admittedly I also would buy my apples in a shop where they aren’t as big as watermelons as they are usually sold. But no Coke?

The “Zephyr” is already half an hour late when it leaves Emeryville, the first stop on the fifty hours plus journey and the station I boarded the train. Beautiful double-deck cars as you know them from the movies, big, silver, as pressed from recycled Diet Coca Cola cans or vice versa. Inside the coach wagon plenty of space for every seat and passenger. If you’ve ever been to the US the recent years you might have noticed that they drown in rules, policies, restrictions and liability exclusions. Sometimes it’s funny to read a warning on a lighter that it might get hot. Or that “Diesel engine exhausts […] are known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and other reproductive harm” as labeled in every wagon. Beside that the last comma is wrong I wonder why I never read a similar warning note on one of the wonderful highways of the State of California. Do you think I should tell them? Mostly those warnings and restrictions are a hassle and what all these laws initially tried to preserve, your personal freedom, is cut down to an unbearable minimum. Treat ‘em like idiots and what you get are idiots, that’s just my personal opinion. Now guess what happens to someone who is pushed and held back, all in the same time, through his entire life, when this person is the regulator of a set of rules. You’re right. You get it all back.

Usually paying customers are called “ladies and gentlemen”, “dear passengers” or even “dear guests”. Not so on this Amtrak train where a strict voice continuously started with a “Hey folks!” followed by a code of conduct. The only time I heard a “thank you” was when the staff handled their internal communication over the speakers. Now it wasn’t all bad at all! The scenery on the first two days is outstanding! First the train crosses the Sierra Nevada and on the second day the Rocky Mountains, passing Green River, a town forty mile short of where my motorcycle waits to be moved (that was hard…). A fantastic journey, winding up the mountain passes before it goes steep down to Denver from where you ride through endless plains.

There were also funny moments, especially when one of the drill sergeants repeatedly started to despairing explain themselves over the speakers, why the fridge is not running or why they skipped some numbers on the waiting list of the dinner car. Calling those numbers was funny anyway because Amtrak stewards seem to have a similar disability like Swiss news speakers when they should announce stock market figures. More than three numbers in a row never go through smoothly. Those messages usually went on for minutes and lightened up the mood of the, er, folks.

Not as in many areas in this world, where a train station naturally is a bustling meeting point of people and businesses, a train station in the US is a last resort, free of commerce and commercials. It’s the perfect opposite to Silicon Valley. If in the old world it’s always a good choice to follow the train station signs when you are looking for the towns center, you can be sure to find not a single shop to stock up your food and water depot any near to a train station in the US. It’s even a space free of time, there are no clocks at all. What makes sense, though there are no timetables neither. But that’s cool, I really liked that. It makes the whole journey much more adventurous when you have the impression that everything is improvised but of such a complexity, that you truly feel grateful to arrive at all. Despite a three hours delay I never before saw people disembarking a train happier than I did in Chicago. The spirit of the wild west lives on when crossing the country in a train. In the mountains I was watching out for bandits who will run up the train with their horses and rob us. But nothing such happened. The last business that was finally tore down sometime after Denver, was the personal business. The restrooms stopped working when the dump tanks overloaded. And hey, that has the atmosphere of an Italian train crossing the Alpes!

The recommended experience of a lifetime: Get on in San Francisco and leave in Denver. Plan plenty of stopovers as the nature is marvelous. Give yourself two to three weeks for this stretch.