Infinite America, Part 6: From coast to coast in one fat post

The Story So Far
Part 1: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018825480
Part 2: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018825709
Part 3: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018825986
Part 4: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018826315
Part 5: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018826928

When I left you, we were in New York City getting ready to go west. I saw Yankee Stadium...



...34th Street...



...the United Nations...



...midtown Manhattan...



...the Brooklyn Bridge area...



...the new World Trade Center...



...and, of course, the famous New York subway system.



You hear all these horror stories about the New York subway. It's dirty, it's dark, it's worn-out, it's full of criminals, it's just this awful, awful place. I used four subway systems on this trip: Washington, DC; Boston; New York; and San Francisco. The only one I'd count as "dirty" and "worn-out" is the DC Metro. All subways are "dark," no matter where in the world they are - which is a side effect of building a train station twenty feet underground. And as for "full of criminals"...I don't think I saw any "criminals" even on the DC Metro, but I haven't memorized what all the Republican congressmen look like. But they forget to tell you the REAL fun part about the New York Subway: how unbelievably hot the stations are. New York City has a huge public steam system. The steam system parallels the subway system, and the heat off the pipes winds up in the stations. Anyone sensitive to heat should only ride buses in New York City in the summer.

Now it's time to do a little nighttime training...





We rolled out of Penn Station a little after 3:30 pm bound for Chicago...



...passed through the Adirondacks...



...and returned to Union Station a little after 9 am.



The westbound California Zephyr is a very well-scheduled train: it goes through the flat, boring parts in the middle of the night. It also goes up the eastern side of the Rockies then, depositing you at Denver's Union Station very early in the morning...





which leads us to...







Now that we have the mandatory picture of a weed store out of the way...

I'm only going to show you two more pictures from Denver:



and



Denver has a lot of things to DO. Things to SEE are another story: it is a pretty, midsized Mountain West city but the really spectacular stuff is outside the city limits. If you want to go to Denver, take a week, rent a car and snag a Mile High Culture Pass. I found a food trailer selling doner kebabs, and that was kinda cool - he got the meat and the sauce right, but he is forced to use the wrong bread: American flatbread rather than the impossible-to-find Turkish doner kebab roll. I'll let him slide on that one.

Returning to




...this is where it gets really good.













This picture fairly screams, "bring a camera with between-frame data imprinting and a handheld GPS on a trip like this!" When I got the film back from the lab, I kinda thought this was a Montana picture. Then I looked a little closer. See that building just to the left of the three two-story buildings? It says "Walker's Toggery" on it. A quick Google search shows Walker's Toggery in Truckee, California. Nope, not Montana.

With as much film as I had, getting confused is understandable. If you write down the time and GPS coordinates of everywhere you expose a frame, then use Google Maps to display the locations when you get home, you'll never get confused. There are only five cameras I know of that will print the data BETWEEN frames, which is what you want: Nikon's F4 and F5 have optional data backs, the Nikon F6 includes it as a standard feature - with the price tag of an F6 being what it is, they SHOULD give it to you! - and in medium format, both the Hasselblad H-series and the Mamiya 645AF series will do it. If you want a medium-format autofocus camera and you see either of those, grab it QUICK: because both are designed to accept digital backs as well as film backs, people buy used bodies to mount digital backs on. The back itself is between $10,000 and $20,000, so you can well understand the attraction! My recommendation: Get an F4 with the MF-23 back. There are a lot of them out there, they're super cheap (less than $200, in most cases) and they work extremely well. If I'd have had enough room in my pack to hold a second camera, I would have brought mine.

There are a lot of tunnels on this route. One springs to mind quickly: The train staff got on the intercom and announced that "once we pass through this tunnel, we will be at the highest elevation Amtrak travels." Naturally, I'm sitting there staring intently through my viewfinder, finger at the ready, prepared to shoot the glorious scene from the top of the world when the mighty Zephyr roared out above the highest point in the entire Amtrak system...and then the train actually emerged from the tunnel. The trees up there were so dense, seeing anything would have been like looking through a green Berlin Wall.





Strange thing: a lot of the Rockies are bare of trees. It's not because of clearcutting; an Idahoan can spot a clearcut from twenty miles away. It's more like the ground has lost the ability to support trees there. I'd love to take a handful of Republicans on this route and ask them, "what the hell?" but you know Republicans would never support a socialist enterprise like Amtrak. (They stick to socialist enterprises like the air traffic system and the highway system.)

We coursed our way out of the Sierra Nevadas and around the Navy's floating maritime graveyard to arrive at Emeryville, California - the worst-placed station on the whole Amtrak network. Amtrak knows this, so they have bus service between the station and San Francisco. Of course, I didn't remember you could buy tickets for the bus through the Quik-Trak kiosk sitting right there, so I decided to walk (a very long walk at that) to the BART station and ride the subway into San Francisco.



Speaking of the San Francisco subway...if the word "sparkling" can apply to a subway, it applies to BART. They do things right there.

The first of my two days in SF was spent on the waterfront, or walking to it...



This is the back of the Ghirardelli factory, where the chocolate is made. Strangely enough, you can't smell chocolate on the air around here.

Please help me out here: There's a CVS drugstore where Jefferson Street becomes The Embarcadero. In it they have a good assortment of San Francisco souvenirs. One of the things they sell is an "Alcatraz gift basket" with a bunch of Alcatraz-themed crap...and also a chocolate bar labeled "Alcatraz Good Behavior Bar." (I got some chocolate, but not THAT chocolate.) Come on...did they actually give these to inmates, or is this just invented tourist crap?



This is why I'll never move to San Francisco: the houses are zero inches apart - literally; they TOUCH, which is one of the reasons every house in San Francisco is masonry - and the streets are kinda steep. Strange thing: everyone knows about Lombard Street, the "crookedest street in America." It is not, however, the STEEPEST. Leavenworth Street leading up to the base of Lombard is worse. There are streets even worse than that. Would you like to be the richest person in San Francisco? Start a company that does brake jobs in office building parking lots.



I usually shy away from "standard tourist photos" but a fella can't go to San Francisco and NOT photograph Alcatraz.



There are CABLE cars, which the tourists ride, and STREET cars, which everyone rides. This is a streetcar. There are several, and no two look alike.



For reasons unknown I have a vast collection of pictures of coves.



Did they "restore" The Castro Theater, or did they keep it nice and not have to? Either way, it's beautiful - and a lot more fun than your ordinary cineplex.



Figure this shit out: How in hell do you build a COUNTRY CLUB (that's what the sign says, "Castro Country Club&quot on the side of an 80-percent grade in the middle of the most densely constructed city in America?



The Castro relishes its history as the West Coast's epicenter of the Gay Rights movement, like the Haight-Ashbury district celebrates its place in hippie culture. They do not, however, seem so willing to relish actual hippies and gay people: as soon as the hippies fixed up the Haight and the gays fixed up the Castro, the landlords priced both groups out of their homes. Now the gays are working on the Tenderloin...which desperately needs it.



They're sluts. But that doesn't change the fact this bank actually LOOKS like a bank, not a dentist's office.

I returned to Emeryville and waited for the train. Ten pm comes. No train. Ten-thirty comes. "We are delayed because there is a car stalled on the tracks in Oakland." Hang on for a second kids, that's what the train is for: recruit twenty or thirty people from it to go outside and push the car back, and the problem's solved. Eventually they got the car out of the way, the train arrived, and we loaded on and immediately went to sleep.

Tomorrow: we're pointed at Seattle; that will close out our little excursion.