The Great American Rail Trip - Prologue

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Some friends and I are in the midst of a great adventure-an Amtrak adventure. That's right, we are doing a cross-country rail trip. Rail trip is the train equivalent of a road trip, right?

Amtrak offers something called the USA Rail Pass. For $499, this pass allows you 10 "segments" of Amtrak trips to use at your leisure. This provides the opportunity to treat Amtrak as a hop-on hop-off service, and we are treating it as such.

Amtrak visits some pretty awesome places, so we figured we would get some sweet sightseeing in along the way. After all, we can just hop on the next train whenever we disembark.

Here is an overview of our itinerary:

Leg 1: Cleveland to Flagstaff, AZ with a quick layover in Chicago. Flagstaff is very close to the wonderful sights of Sedona and the Grand Canyon, so we are renting a car to visit these wonders! We used 2 of our 10 segments on this leg due to the layover in Chicago.

Leg 2: Flagstaff to Los Angeles. We plan to spend a couple of days in LA and explore what So-Cal has to offer.

Leg 3: Los Angeles to San Jose, CA (San Francisco Bay Area). Fortunately, I have family in the Bay Area and we will stay with them for a few days, seeing what No-Cal has to offer.

Leg 4: Emeryville, CA (Bay Area) to Salt Lake City. We may end up skipping this leg, since we plan to be in Salt Lake City for just 24 hours. Amtrak offers lots of flexibility and you just change your itinerary so long as seats are available. If we do decide to make the stop, we will do some hiking in the mountains surrounding SLC.

Leg 5: SLC to Denver. We plan to rent a car and spend the night in Estes Park at the YMCA of the Rockies, which is essentially a resort owned by the YMCA. Estes Park is the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, so we will do some sweet hiking there!

Leg 6: Back home. Denver to Cleveland, with another layover in Chicago 

Stay tuned for updates for each of the legs of our trip! 

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