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The courtly gentleman from the Christian Science Monitor has just finished telling me how he got from Irkutsk, Siberia to Ulan Bator, Mongolia, but he suggests I don’t try it. It must have been, reminisces Bill Hughes, about on a par with that three-day drive they both once took from Addis Ababa to Asmara. They smile in memory of discomforts past. It will be a long time before Ron Butler forgets the pièce de résistance at a recent fête champêtre in Germany, the Bavarian musician who played a flute with his nose. So go conversations among veteran travel writers. But that was another day, another trip.

We gaze idly out the window. It’s 8:30 and still light over the desert. We’re pounding through a vast expanse of nothingness, at sixty or seventy miles an hour, somewhere between Reno and Winnemucca, Nevada: sand, scrub growth, no signs of habitation, nature forbidding and inhospitable. In the distance a low range of mountains crenel-lates the deepening evening sky. There is no magnificent sunset programmed tonight, but the clouds that were bluegrey a moment back are crisping around the edges with purple and bronze. Out there, somewhere, men are knocking themselves out, manhandling their heavy trailer trucks and buses down the Interstates toward the Great Salt Lake Desert while we dig into steaks and brook trout in the cool, clean, well-appointed diner of Amtrak’s San Francisco Zephyr.

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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The courtly gentleman from the Christian Science Monitor has just finished telling me how he got from Irkutsk, Siberia to Ulan Bator, Mongolia, but he suggests I don’t try it. It must have been, reminisces Bill Hughes, about on a par with that three-day drive they both once took from Addis Ababa to Asmara. They smile in memory of discomforts past. It will be a long time before Ron Butler forgets the pièce de résistance at a recent fête champêtre in Germany, the Bavarian musician who played a flute with his nose. So go conversations among veteran travel writers. But that was another day, another trip.

We gaze idly out the window. It’s 8:30 and still light over the desert. We’re pounding through a vast expanse of nothingness, at sixty or seventy miles an hour, somewhere between Reno and Winnemucca, Nevada: sand, scrub growth, no signs of habitation, nature forbidding and inhospitable. In the distance a low range of mountains crenel-lates the deepening evening sky. There is no magnificent sunset programmed tonight, but the clouds that were bluegrey a moment back are crisping around the edges with purple and bronze. Out there, somewhere, men are knocking themselves out, manhandling their heavy trailer trucks and buses down the Interstates toward the Great Salt Lake Desert while we dig into steaks and brook trout in the cool, clean, well-appointed diner of Amtrak’s San Francisco Zephyr.