The Route from Mississippi to Canada (or How I Spent 44 Hours on Trains)

This is the 4^th time I’ve taken the train from New Orleans or Mississippi to Canada, and each time I’ve made the trip, I’ve broken it up differently.

A thing I love about train travel is how it forces you to slow down and experience the places you’re traveling through. Technically you can take just 2 trains to get from New Orleans to Montreal—the Crescent line which runs daily from New Orleans to New York City and the Adirondack line which runs daily from New York City to Montreal. But because the Crescent arrives in New York in the evening and the Adirondack leaves New York in the morning, you’d have to spend at least one night in the city. When I’m traveling by train, I’m not typically concerned with the fastest route between places. I break my trip up differently every time I do this journey so I can always explore somewhere new.

My first 26 hours of train travel were the direct line to Washington, D.C.

The first hours of the journey are always pleasant. The train is largely empty, and you can pick where you want to sit and likely get two seats to yourself. You write and read books and think, wow, I could do this for DAYS! Then somewhere around Birmingham, the train starts to fill up. You get a seatmate and have to rearrange your temporary home (about which you feel very territorial). And then around 11:00pm when you reach Atlanta, you start to wonder if you’ve made a terrible mistake. (Every time. It’s always Atlanta where I feel the panic.) It is so late, and there are so many people on the train, and you don’t know how you’ll ever sleep sitting upright like a stiff owl while trying not to let your head bob onto your neighbor.

But you breathe a sigh of relief in Atlanta when the train mostly empties. And sometimes you get a merciful few hours of having your own seat again where you can lay down in a tiny ball and pray for your back to not hurt the next day.

On this particular journey, the train staff woke me up at 2:00am because I had to sit up to make room for my new seatmate. I thought This is it, I will not survive this night of claustrophobia. But by morning, you feel a little delirious, and the sunrise is nice, and you remember that the train is actually a lovely home. My seatmate was a delight. She chatted about her farm animals, the tiny house she’s working on, politics, family, travel—the kind of conversations you never find yourself having with strangers unless you are stuck next to them for 12 hours.

The people you meet on trains are special connections. I’m still in touch with multiple people I’ve met on trains in the past. I received a text message a few months ago from a stranger-turned-friend I sat next to for 28 hours on a train back in 2017. I’m riding the Amtrak from Florida to NYC and thought of you, he said. Now I follow my new friend’s farm on Facebook and will reach out to her if ever I’m passing through South Carolina.

D.C. always feels like a necessary stop for a few reasons. First, because after spending 26 hours in a coach seat, you reach the limits of your sanity. And the timing is nice—you arrive in the early afternoon which is ideal for check-in at most accommodations. You have time to wander around, make the blood flow return to your legs, eat dinner, and regain your mental faculties.

Second, D.C. has a lot of good budget accommodation options. It’s one of few cities in the US with some good hostel selections, so it’s less expensive to visit for a night or two than a smaller town would be.

But the main reason is that I love it.

D.C. wasn’t a place I imagined loving at first. I visited for the first time the way a lot of people do—very briefly as a teenager and only to see the National Mall. It felt like a very sterile form of tourism, and I imagined that the people who lived in the city all wore very stiff suits and never laughed.

But I unintentionally kept getting pulled back to D.C. after that. On a road trip in college, for job interviews, stranded on an airport layover during a blizzard, and on long weekend to see a friend during grad school. And with every visit and every hour of solo wandering, I uncovered something unexpected that made me love the city more. I wasn’t looking for a job in D.C. when I got an unexpected offer, but it felt serendipitous. I only lived in D.C. for a year, but it will always feel a little like a home to me—one of many places that feel like versions of home.

When I got to D.C. now, I go without an agenda except to eat my favorite snacks, go to my favorite bookstores, and walk until my calves ache. Which is what I did on this trip. I stayed in the adorable High Road Hotel and Hostel where I had private room with a giant window. In D.C., you can choose from countless generic downtown hotels that are all clean, nice, and predictable. But fewer people know this exists—in a historic brownstone that feels like staying in a hospitable friend’s house in one of D.C.’s most eclectic neighborhoods.

I spent 2 nights in D.C. During my full-day there, I ran some travel errands, ate cookies the size of my head from Levain and met up with an old friend—coincidentally the same friend I visited D.C. with 15 years ago before I realized I may have judged it too quickly. We had no idea we’d both end up living there.

Cities always feel like characters in a story to me. In the way I write about them and the relationship I have with them. Visiting cities I once lived in feels like visiting an old friend. Look at all we’ve been through, I think. How wonderful to see you. I hope you’ve been hanging in there amid all this chaos. (And for the record, the D.C. I know never wears a suit unless forced.)

The next morning, I woke up at 4:45am, took the Northeast Regional Amtrak line to New York City, took the subway to Grand Central, and took the Metro North the 1.5 hours up to Poughkeepsie. I dropped my bags off at my Airbnb then got back on the Metro North for the 15-minute ride down to Beacon. I stayed in a bedroom in a shared Airbnb in Poughkeepsie because I couldn’t find any accommodations in Beacon for less than $300 per night. Piecing together this plan meant a lot of Ubers, more money than I wanted to spend, and frankly a lot of trouble, but I was determined to see little Beacon.

Beacon is one of those towns that feel too quaint to be real. So many well-groomed dogs, so many cute shops selling things I absolutely don’t need and will never need but now want, so many little cafes and bakeries that I could sit in for hours. There’s a cute river and breweries alongside it where the people get cheeseboards and wine and let their dogs frolic while they have photogenic picnics. It feels removed from reality in a way—a Stars Hollow to visit for a moment before returning to real life.

 

And then the next day, I took my favorite train ride in North America—the Amtrak Adirondack through upstate New York to Montreal.

Volunteers with the Trails and Rails Program (a collaboration between Amtrak and the National Park Service) told stories in the café car as we passed historical sites. I was surprised and delighted to see that it was still happening after all the government cuts to our national parks, but then I remembered that these people aren’t getting paid. They just do it because they love it.

The train stopped in Albany for long enough that could go inside the station to the café. And then we carried on alongside Lake Champlain with views that rival Europe’s prettiest train routes.

Our train was nearly empty. My car had only about 5 people in it, so our border stop was surprisingly short. Still border patrol did some intense questioning. More than nearly any other border I’ve crossed, the border between the United States and Canada feels unnecessarily intimidating. (Only the Bulgaria/Turkey border may have been worse.) The border crossing has looked different each time I’ve done it. Once I crossed by bus, and we had to get off the bus, collect our luggage, put it through x-ray machines, and go through passports checks inside the border office. Once drug dogs came on the train and searched it as our passports were checked. This time I had to try to explain what a co-living space was to the very intimidating officer questioning me. It doesn’t help matters that the people hired for this job always look like actors cast in a law enforcement drama. My answers to his questions did not seem to clear things up for him, but since there were so few of us to question, the whole thing went quickly anyway.

Amtrak’s line ends in Montreal, and from there, you have to swap to Canada’s national rail company, Via Rail, for further travel in Canada. My train arrived late in Montreal, so I decided to stay one night in a hostel before continuing on the next morning. It was a long enough stop to eat dinner, sleep, and drop off a bag of my luggage at the house I’ll be living in for all of July—a brief preview of what to look forward to.

 

Then the next day (day 5), I took a 3-hour train ride on one of Canada’s remarkably clean trains to reach Quebec City, the farthest point north on the train-travel portion of my journey. Via Rail is the product of a country that clearly cares about train travel. The seats aren’t huge for a commuter trip as short as this one, but the train cars are spotless and bright. The bathrooms are clean and don’t require you to touch anything. The soap and sink have motion sensors, and the door lock is a single button that actually works. (Amtrak is notorious for bathroom locks that you THINK you’ve locked only to learn that you failed.) The cars and bathrooms are fully handicap accessible. Friendly staff roll a little trolly through the cars to sell you nice snacks and lunch. And I point these things out as Amtrak’s biggest fan! It’s not their fault that they don’t have the resources they need.

The cost of all these trains: $0 for the Amtrak rides and $80-something for the one Via Rail ride in Canada. Amtrak reward points are worth so much more than their monetary value, and I cannot recommend getting an Amtrak credit card enough if you are a person who ever travels by train. I’ll tell you how much each ticket would have cost in US dollars and how many trips I’m getting out of my Amtrak Credit card reward points in one of my next posts.

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