8:26 am PST, 9:26 MST, July 9

I have decided that while I love Colorado, I hate Denver.

First the love. The land here is so gorgeous. Before you get to the rockies you reach the foothills, an area called the hogbacks, typified by dramatic red a brown rock thrusting from the ground in seemingly random places.

In Colorado, you can regularly see the dramatic power of Earth's geology. Everywhere you see the sedimentary layers of rock that formed millions of years ago when the middle of North America was not a mountain range, but an inland sea. These layers are not horizontal but in sharp angles from the ground, a testimony to the intensity of the forces that pushed the Rockies skyward.

Then you get into the Rockies themselves and you find yourself in a Pine forest unlike anything I've seen in the Northwest. Abby pointed out how different the smell is. Washington forests are damp, whereas the Rockies are dry as a bone. The trees are not as soft and there are no ferns to be seen.

Follow up:

Kim picked us up at the Denver train station early on Tuesday and after an all-organic breakfast we went out to the city of Golden, home of the largest brewery in the world. It's owned by Coors and they have free tours, complete with free beer. We took the tour and while it was essentially a long commercial for Coors Light, it was still interesting to look out at the giant copper kettles in which the beer is brewed and to watch an assembly line of beer cans get filled and packaged into 30 packs (who needs that much beer?).

The best part was the free samples of course. They don't just make shit beer like Coors Light and Keystone, but also Blue Moon and Killian's Irish Red. I also discovered that beer tastes much better fresh from the brewery, and at the altitude it was brewed.

We went out and explored the hogbacks and some exposed dinosaur footprints on a hillside. We retired an hour north of Denver to Kim's aunt's house, where she has been staying.

The next day we drove out to Rocky Mountain National Park and hiked up the mountains. It was crowded, but trails had awe-inspiring views of the peaks so it was worth it. It wasn't exhausting either, despite the high altitude (we were well over 10,000 feet at our highest point). Our original plan was to do a 6-mile loop, but we turned around and did a few smaller spurs instead after discovering that despite the 100-degree heat in the lowlands, there was still snow on the trails up in the mountains.

Then we went to Denver. Imagine a place that has all the things you don't like about the US, without any of the good parts. There's nothing but suburbia, strip clubs and mega-churches. Downtown Denver seems like a seedy copy of Bellevue: everyone is stuck up, you can't get anywhere without a car and there are no real landmarks to speak of, and yet there are adult bookshops and crack dealers on every corner. Denver is the only city we have been to so far that I never want to see again.

We are leaving today on a train that is now about two and a half hours late. We rode a taxi to the station and the driver took a bit of a scenic route to bring our fare up. At one point we arrived at the Greyhound station instead and he bumbled around, pretending he had made a mistake.

In any case all of our major destinations have passed. We will get some time to explore Sacramento tomorrow, but from here on out we have only home to look forward to.

4:15 pm PST, 5:15 PM MST

We are passing through the southern part of Wyoming on our way to Utah. My God, this state is so empty! When we rode through Montana and North Dakota and other large, sparsely populated states we would still see signs of civilization, like towns every few miles and junk yards. But here all we've seen for the last hour or so are barbed wire fences, power lines, wind turbines and cows.

When we first crossed into Wyoming from Colorado, I felt like I was on a terraformed Mars. There was sparse vegetation with shrubs and grass, but some of the reddest rocks I've ever seen jutted out of the ground and from hillsides everywhere in view.

We were running along side an interstate for a while, but now the only roads in sight are dusty dirt roads. The only real city we've seen, Laramie, reminded me of something from the old West.

11:43 am, July 10

We are passing through the Sierra Nevadas east of Sacramento. We passed through a tunnel creatively called the “Big Hole” a few hours ago. It was the opposite of our trip through the tunnel under the Cascades. The eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada are still part of the deserts around Reno and Nevada. We spent most of the morning in those deserts. They aren't quite like I expected them. Short shrubs cover everything, each one spaced neatly a few feet from its neighbor. I somehow expected salt flats and sand dunes. That or cacti.

Now we are on the west side and are back in the gorgeous evergreen forests of the west coast. The trees are yellower here, and the exposed soil on hillsides is grayish instead of a dark brown like at home. The evergreen trees on the mountains around me are probably Sequoia or maybe Redwoods instead of Douglas Firs and Cedars. But still, I'm beginning to feel like I am in familiar territory.

I'm beginning to get a good feeling for how very different train travel is from planes. On a plane, you enter the aluminum tube and a few hours later emerge in a different climate, culture and landscape. Except for the tunnels and when you go to sleep, the land slips past gradually on a train. It takes hours or days to shift from one climate to the next and you get to watch that landscape change. You can tell very little about the land below you on a plane, save for the fact that it looks like a green and brown checkerboard.

We'll be in Sacramento by 3:13 pm and will be on a train back to Seattle by midnight. By 9 pm on Saturday, we will be home.

11:53 am PST, July 11

There are few things in life better than reminiscing with old friends.

I hadn't seen Mallorie and James in five and four years respectively. Basically not since high school. I knew they were living near Sacramento, so I had sent them Facebook messages hoping we could meet up while Abby and I were there. I wasn't sure if the short notice meant they would be able to make it, but lo and behold as I sat using the slow as hell train station wifi, I get a call from James telling me they will be downtown soon.

We got sushi and wandered around Sacramento, sharing our mutual dislike of California. We caught up on each other's lives and of the lives of our mutual friends. We talked about high school and how different we all were back then.

Talking to them brought back floods of memories that had remained buried and unused in a corner of my mind for half a decade. I've been lucky to have had two other conversations with people from high school that shook loose old forgotten memories, and giving me the opportunity to get to know these old friends again. Some of what we've talked about would be considered gossip had the news not been five years too late. Instead it was history, or background, learning things I had never known about all those people who took the ride through childhood along side us.

It was a fine end for this amazing voyage. We are now in Oregon amongst the familiar evergreen trees of the Pacific Northwest. We'll be meeting my parents at the Amtrak station in downtown Seattle at around 8 pm tonight. My trip of a lifetime will be over, but not a moment too soon.

10:08 am PST, July 12

Abby and I are back in town. We did some calculations using the distances listed on the Amtrak time table and discovered that we traveled around 8,400 miles by rail in the last three weeks. To give you a sense of how huge that is, the circumference of the Earth at the equator is about 24,901 miles. The diameter of the Earth is only 7,926 miles. If we had taken a train through the Earth's core all the way to the other side, we wouldn't have gone as far as we did on this trip (we would also be dead from the heat, and we would have nothing to show from it since Seattle's antipodal point lies somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean).

This was a long trip to say the least.