Since we are budget travelers and California is a high price state we have been avoiding it and now are only passing through on the Great Train Adventure.
Another night on the train was just as bad as our first night crossing Kansas trying to rest in a tilt back seat rolling along in the dark passing through occasional blasts of light from a small town until they stop at a well lighted station and add plenty of noise. One advantage of the cheap seats in the back of the train is I could look out of the second floor window over the top of the baggage car to catch the sunrise..
As we pass through the megalopolis east of Los Angelus in the land of milk and honey it is filled with palm trees and roads and roads and roads. It is also a fact of life that the trains are an industrial utility and pass through industrial areas which do not always have the best scenery as we will see anytime we are in more populated areas.
In Los Angelus we switched to the Coast Starlight which we will ride to Seattle, Washington. Heading north out of Los Angelus we are initially in heavily populated areas with extensive decorations which are sometimes difficult to differentiate between graffiti and intentional murals.
Breaking out of the megolopolis we will be mostly following US101 up to San Francisco with ocassional glimpses of the Pacific Ocean.
The Los Angelus to San Francisco corridor still has a lot of rugged spaces filled with rocks, wildflowers along the coast, and also the sagebrush and jack rabbits. Southern California is still part of the Great American Desert sustaining a large population only with massive water imports. Another question for another time is how sustainable for how long.
There are also pockets that have enough natural or imported water to support agriculture. After the long night crossing the Rocky Mountains on the train we stopped in Salinas, California to get a shower and sleep in real bed.
Remember there is only one train a day so we have to get back on at the same time we got off the prior day. This gives us plenty of time to wander about town sampling some of the Spring wildflowers.
Back on the train we only have a little daylight left on what will be a 26 hour marathon to Seattle, Washington. This photograph shows the edges on Monteray Bay just north of Salinas and we will pass through Oakland about midnight as we jog over to the center of the state passing through Sacramento and then straight north to Oregon.
In the dawn just before sunrise we can just catch some glimpses of Mt Shasta.
Then as the sun starts to get fully up we pass a large mine of what I presume is iron ore as the satellite images show the whole hill is this red rock.
Then it is on to Oregon.