Not cars. Trains, please!

Weekend Assignment #219: What is your favorite form of transportation, and why? You can choose any means of traveling by land, sea or air, with just one catch: it has to currently exist in the real world, or have existed in the past. No TARDIS, no Star Trek transporter, no flying DeLoreans, all right?

Extra Credit: What's the most unusual form of transportation you've ever taken?

Judging by the replies to this assignment I've read so far, my opinion is not a majority one. My answer to this question is really very much, extremely, way totally not a car. I hate the confined space, the way a car gets so hot if it's left in the sun too long and touching the steering wheel is painful, the high gas prices, the eating, guilty feeling I have every time I drive my car that I'm not helping the environment any, and well, the very real possibility of crashing into other cars. Also, I can't read and drive at the same very effectively, nor do I think it would be wise of me to try to work on that skill.

The concept of "cool cars" leaves me cold. Unless its coolness factor has to do with being fuel-efficient or safe, I just don't care.

Now, trains, I think, are marvelous. When I traveled by train to Vancouver last fall, I think the train journey was the best part of the trip. The Pacific Northwest out a train's window is truly one of the wonders of the world: thank the Good Lord for trees and bodies of water! On a train you don't have to worry about keeping your eyes on the road - you really can just focus on drinking in the beauty.

I also got in quite a bit of New Yorker reading on the train journey, along with more creative writing than I'd managed to do in a long time. I'm tempted to jump on a train again to get myself writing!

It's also fun to go to the dining car at meal time and meet your fellow travelers, although admittedly the extra cost of this is sometimes prohibitive. To me, the social factor makes it worth it. I thoroughly enjoy meeting others "on the road."

The most fun I've ever had on trains were on sleeper cars. How often can you spend the night on a real bed while still moving toward your destination? Back in college, on a study abroard program in London, a girlfriend and I took a weekend trip to Scotland on a sleeper car on the train, after stocking up on Hooch's hard lemonade, junk food, and British women's magazines. We had fun trying to translate the magazines into American (did you know that the English call runs in nylons "ladders"?). Now, I normally try to avoid junk food, as well as magazines of the quality we read on that trip, but that was a very special occasion.

I also rode in a sleeper car from Quebec to New Brunswick, from there to catch a bus to Prince Edward Island, and from Shanghai to the northern city of Tianjin during my tour of China with a Chinese theater group. Our performing troupe included a professional violinist. Waking up on that train in the early morning to the sound of her music accompanying the sunrise is one of my very favorite memories.

Extra credit:

My answer to this was going to be cable cars in San Francisco, but then I remembered I'd hopped on one of those bicycle rickshaw things the last time I was in New York City. Bicycle rickshaws are probably more common around the world than cable cars are, but for a Bay Area native, the bicycle rickshaw wins.