Tom's Arizona Adventure: Train Trip

The 30 hour Amtrak ride gave me plenty of time to take some good pictures. I think I spent 28 of those 30 hours in the glass lounge car in the center of the train. Basically we went through a bunch of small towns in Illinois like Galesburg and crossed the Mississippi River into Iowa for a brief time (maybe 45 minutes). After that we hit Missouri, which had some nice hilly forests but overall wasn't terribly exciting.

Kansas City, the 37th largest city in the county, was the first big city we stopped in. It is a big city in area, but its downtown is not very big, although it is dense with tall buildings. Layout reminds me of Indianapolis. Its skyline is shorter than Indy's, but seemed bigger for some reason. KC's tallest building, One Kansas City Place, stands 651 ft tall with 42 floors. This would rank as the 29th tallest building in Chicago and the 57th tallest building in New York. It's roughly the same height, though taller than, the Daley Center and Lake Point Tower in Chicago, and the Waldorf-Astoria and the New York Life Building in New York. We got there around 11 pm, roughly 30-45 late due to an air hose that broke in Missouri and delayed us. I wasn't expecting much in KC, but at least at night it seemed like a great city. The city has a great gangster history, rivaling those in New York and Chicago. In fact, Kansas City's Union Station and the surrounding neighborhood, where we stopped, witnessed some gunfights in the old days. Its location made it the perfect lawless city in the 1800s, serving as a Gateway to the West. It's really industrial on the Missouri side that holds and I learned that the Kansas side leads the nation in tech development (and I guess Kansas as a whole is a leader in this area). Kansas City, MO is the bigger of the two neighboring Kansas Cities (and the largest city in Missouri) with almost 460,000 in the city, while Kansas City, KS has about 150,000 in the city. For perspective, Kansas City, MO is a bit larger than Atlanta and a big smaller than Denver. Kansas City, KS is bigger than Syracuse, Naperville, and South Bend but smaller than Joliet and Paterson, NJ.

Anyway, I liked what I saw in KC better than what I've seen in St. Louis, and the following trip through Kansas was pretty fun. The exception was Topeka, the state capital and Kansas' 4th largest city. Topeka reminded me a bit of South Bend and Gary, so make your own conclusions from there... The absolute best part of Kansas was the thunderstorm in the middle of the night. I was in the lounge car to watch this with a friend I met from the area. We weren't able to turn the lights off in the car to see the lightning better, but this storm was like something out of Wizard of Oz. We hit Dodge City in the early morning hours, and once you get there you've basically hit the Old West. Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado have a ton of corn and wheat fields, but are pretty desert-y as well and relatively rocky compared to Iowa and Illinois. I learned from my new Colorado friend that when the Spanish conquistador Coronado visited Kansas in the 1500s, he described the landscape as the most lush desert he'd ever seen.

I got to see Pike's Peak again, although it was at least 60 miles away, along with a bunch of other mountains, one of which is still an active volcano. Most of the mountains are a part of the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Range in Colorado and New Mexico. Overall, southeast Colorado has a lot of rolling hills with bluffs nearby and mountains in the distance.

Terrain really changed at the CO-NM border between Trinidad, CO and Raton, NM. This whole area consisted of forested mountains with incredible views of the Rockies, and I remember seeing a sign that marked our elevation at 7200-7400 ft above sea level (over 1000 ft above Colorado Springs, close to 2000 ft above Denver, and a couple hundred higher than where I'm living now in AZ).

The areas between Raton and Albuquerque, specifically around Las Vegas, (New Mexico, not Nevada) and Lamy. There were a ton of cows and some deer and/or antelope, not to mention the wild horses. The scenery varied from sparsely-shrubbed sandy mountains, to brown-rock cliffs and rolling green meadows, and sometimes you could see all of these things at once. The sky out there is ridiculously blue and you can practically touch the clouds. This landscape complemented the adobe villages and old mission churches very nicely.

To say that Albuquerque, the nation's 32nd largest city, has some poverty issues is an understatement. There were many impoverished trailer neighborhoods on the outskirts of town, and I saw a lot of junk yards that basically invaded these neighborhoods. Albuquerque, famous for its balloon festival in the fall, is one of the fastest growing cities in the country, with 550,000 people, compared with 450,000 ten years ago and 385,000 ten years before that. The city is very wide, but not tall at all, and it sits in a desert valley with a big brown mountain on the outskirts of town. The tallest building has 22 floors and is 351 ft tall. For comparison, Albuquerque's tallest building (Albuquerque Plaza) would be the 239th tallest in Chicago and the 482nd tallest in New York . It is roughly as tall as Chicago's Merchandise Mart, the National Basilica in DC, and One Times Square in New York where the New Years ball drops, being taller than the first two and shorter than the last one.

The trip from Albuquerque to Gallup, NM (my stop) is where I started seeing some of the areas famous pink and red rock. I told my sister that Gallup, NM, and especially some of the other small towns in New Mexico, reminds me of Radiator Springs, the famous town in the movie Cars. Anyway, that was the trip. I will have more soon and I promise this will be the longest post by far!

90% of Illinois

The Mississippi River between Illinois (to right of river) and Iowa (left)

Sunset over the hills of Missouri

The best shot I could get of Kansas City; One Kansas City Place is tallest blur at 651 ft with 42 floors; taken from platform at Union Station

Various shots of Kansas west of Dodge City up to Colorado

Various shots of Colorado; the last few shots might also be Colorado, but the whole area blends together

Pikes Peak in the distance (I think...kept getting mountains mixed up); 14,115 ft; one of 54 fourteeners (mountains over 14,000 feet) in Colorado and the easternmost; 4th highest peak in the Front Range of the Rockies; 20th highest peak in Colorado

More southeast Colorado

Greenhorn Mountain (I think); 12,352 ft; highest peak in the Wet Mountain Range of the Rockies; 75th highest peak in Colorado

Spanish Peaks (I'm pretty sure on this one); part of the Celebra Subrange, which itself is a part of the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Range of the Rockies

Spanish Peaks (One's a volcano, pretty sure it's one on right, West Spanish Peak)
West Spanish Peak (right peak I think); 13,626 ft; 4th highest peak in Sangre de Cristo Range; 35th highest peak in Colorado
East Spanish Peak (left peak I think); 12,688 ft; 10th highest peak in Sangre de Cristo Range; 63rd highest peak in Colorado