As I boarded the train this afternoon, a vehicle new to my travel, a wave of calmness washed over me as I settled into my seat for the next several hours. Perhaps because of my previous hours logged of travel I thought, or perhaps because of my traveling companion this time.
The train was fairly empty and the giddiness set in, after all, we're on a train for the first time! The first few minutes were spent looking out the window as the world passed us by. It looked different, new somehow though it was the same places we passed that we've always seen. The first few hours were spent in comfortable silence- I finally got to reading Looking for Alaska (a book I'm enjoying tremendously and finding a hard time putting down to write this) and was traveling quite comfortably, and incredibly relaxed when the train chronicles began.
We stopped at Santa Barbara and a flood of college students came in with laptops, college hoodies, and odd sparkly veils that look like they could be for a Halloween costume or a school project. Among the college students was a man (that looked to be homeless, but I am not to say as he did pay with a debit card for his ticket) carrying an out-of-tune guitar and a booming voice. We moved out of the station stop and perhaps half an hour in, my focus began to be pulled from my book as I noticed life bursting around me.
A few rows in front of my a girl struggled through her algebra 1 problems and relentlessly asked the boy across the way from her questions about her math. The girl to the right of me fiddled with her sparkly veil and straightened out the stands that stretched to be no less than seven feet. The scruffy man with the guitar several rows behind me finally had it with the quiet and began talking, to whom? I think to anyone who would make conversation.
As the train ride progressed the boy moved from his seat to the seat right next to the girl struggling with her math, who I had a sneaking suspicion wasn't actually struggling all that much *see mean girls for the proper way to go about this*. I began to tune out the girl to my right who had not stopped fiddling with her costume/project. And the loudest occurrence to be noted was the man who had now begun playing his out of tune guitar and singing easy rhymes like "I'm on a train, and I want to buy some cocaine" escalating to his version of Tina Turner's "Rolling" to the point of the train stewardess asking the man to politely quiet down for the rest of the people on the train to which he responded "but I don't like the quiet!" And finally got to talking about what I thought was the inevitable- government conspiracies.
As I sat on the train in that moment, my traveling companion laughing endlessly beside me, it finally clicked what traveling was all about- the people. And oh how I enjoy seeing these people live so differently than myself.
