March 18-19
I discovered that what I'd thought was Madison was actually Columbus, and Madison was a bit further south. I'd thought the town looked a little small to have a university, but hadn't wanted to insult Gusty's choice of towns.
Aquamarine asked her about the clothes, and she said that she'd started to feel uncomfortable being naked when everyone else was wearing clothes, so she'd started wearing them occasionally, and now she was just kind of used to it. She thought it was important to respect local culture.
I didn't think I was being unrespectful by not wearing clothes. Humans in Equestria weren't expected to go around naked, but it really didn't seem like something to argue about. If Gusty liked wearing clothes, there was nothing wrong with that. Plus she had her coat trimmed really short, and I thought maybe she was cold.
We took turns talking about what we'd been studying. I was the only one who was done with my classes right now; the rest of them were all mid-course. That was one thing that still needed work, I guess; the class schedules between all the different universities didn't line up with ours.
I told them about poetry class and climate science, which I had to dumb down a bit. Some of the really technical stuff went over their heads.
Aquamarine was studying plants, mostly—I thought she would like to meet Brianna if there ever was a chance for that to happen. Most of her work was indoors right now because of the snow, but when spring came she'd be out in the fields. There was a lot of stuff she thought she could learn from human farmers and botanists, and there was stuff she could teach them, too. She was working on a plant-growing experiment with one of her professors (she kind of lost me in some of the details about how the experiment worked).
Cayenne was studying physics, which was a little different on Earth. She'd had a lot of trouble in the beginning because all the symbols were foreign, and the equations were set up differently. I felt her pain: I'd had the same problem helping Peggy with calculus.
There was a lot of measuring equipment that they had on Earth which had proved some of our conjectures, so that was interesting, but humans didn't account for thaumic force in anything, apparently. She thought it was because they couldn't really apply it, and had started her own little lecture group to explain it, which she said as many professors attended as students.
Gusty was studying theatre, and I was pretty proud that I knew a few things about it from Aric. She said that as far as anyone knew, she was going to be the first pony playing Puck in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and recited some of her lines for us.
We probably would have talked through dinner if Mister Barrow hadn't come down to get us.
The tables were only made for four humans at each, and since we didn't want to crowd too much, we sat across the aisle from Mister Barrow and Miss Parker. I kept getting distracted from my menu by the scenery rushing by outside: there was a river running alongside the tracks and the land had gotten a bit hillier in the distance. I knew that when you went west in America you came to the mountains, but I thought they were further away. I was certain that we were still in Wisconsin.
There weren't as many choices as I was used to for dinner, but I finally settled on their black bean vegetable enchiladas. Both the unicorns wanted the pasta (it was tempting, but I didn't want a sauce-covered muzzle), and Aquamarine chose the Pad Thai. Then we had to decide on what to drink, and Cayenne was a big help there. She spent a lot of time out and about when she wasn't in class and had tried a lot of different human drinks, so she knew what all the various kinds of wine were.
Our dinner came while we were stopped in a little town called Wisconsin Dells, and the waiter had just finished setting down our plates when the train pulled out of the station. It was a smoother start this time. Maybe the engineer was getting better.
It was funny that the thing that people most seemed in awe of was Gusty and Cayenne eating their meals with aura-held forks and knives. I guess unicorn magic is pretty neat to watch if you're not used to it.
We each had a piece of cheesecake for dessert, and then we went back to our room. There was a lot of scenery to see, and we figured out pretty quick the best way to sit on the chairs so that we could carry on a good conversation but keep an eye on what was passing outside.
I'd learned that most of the people in America lived on the coasts and southern borders, and a lot of the middle of the country was pretty empty, and it seemed like that when we were on the train. The towns that we passed through were smaller and smaller, and there was a lot of wilderness or big open fields. A lot of the fields were so big that we couldn't even see the houses and barns that must have been there, somewhere.
And the roads had changed a lot, too; many of them were simple dirt trails rather than paved roads with marking stripes.
Aquamarine had brought a deck of cards with her, and Cayenne had some beer, so we started playing euchre with one unicorn per team, since neither of them knew how to play it.
Aquamarine was really good. A lot of earth ponies are smart and cunning. She only got better as we had some drinks, or else I got worse. I do get impulsive sometimes, and that's not the best way to be in a card game, so me and Gusty wound up losing.
Cayenne had a folding computer with her and she set it up and used her field to tap the keys—she was really good at it. She said that she had to do a lot of computer work in her physics class, so she'd had to learn how.
She also had one of the flat telephones that humans like—it was called an iPhone and had a helper called Siri—and she showed us how there was a moving map that showed us where we were. That was really neat; I didn't have to try to read the signs on the towns that we passed by.
There were silver sheds along the track that also had signs with names on them, but they weren't always the same as the town name, or at least I didn't think they were. People had nicknames for things that didn't show up on maps, though, so maybe Yard Limit was what they called one town and it had a different name on her map.
I was yawning and ready for bed when we got to Saint Paul and Minneapolis. Even though the clock on Cayenne's iPhone said it was only ten, it felt later than that to me. Aquamarine felt the same way.
All four of us decided that we'd get out of the train and stretch our legs a little bit. It had to sit at the station for a while; Aquamarine thought that probably the locomotives had to be serviced since they'd been running for so long already. I think she was right; there was a lot of activity on the platform.
Since the station was covered, I thought it would be okay to fly and exercise my wings as well. No airplanes were going to be down here, after all. So I flew the length of the platform a couple of times, and then landed back with the rest of the group and we went back to our room.
The train had left the station and we'd just settled in—me looking out the window at all the city lights—when an attendant came in and offered to set up the beds for us, which was really nice of him.
There were two upper beds and two lower beds, arranged into an L-shape. We decided that we didn't really have much use for the top beds, so we told the attendant to keep them put away.
I was pretty yawny by the time he left, so I excused myself to the bathroom and then crawled into the bed that ran side-to-side.
Our unicorn companions stayed up, but they were kind enough to keep quiet and let us sleep.
March 19
It's strange to sleep on a train. When you wake up, you don't know where you are.
Aquamarine woke up just after me—I'd rolled onto my belly and lifted my head up so that I could see out the window, but there wasn't too much to see because it was still dark out. The lights of the train windows hardly lit up anything at all, and there were only distant pinpoints of light to see, or the occasional car or truck waiting at a railroad crossing.
I could see out the other window that we were next to a road, going a bit faster than the cars alongside. There weren't too many, though. It was still dark out, but it felt to me like it ought to be light already. I guess Daylight Saving Time had messed me up more than I thought.
The sun was just coming up as we passed by a train with orange locomotives waiting on a side track. Just past it, there was a collection of big silver cylinders that Aquamarine said was a grain elevator, which is where grain is sorted and kept until it is ready to be shipped off.
Aquamarine and I decided it was time to get out of bed and get ready for the morning. The train is very self-contained, with bathrooms and showers for the riders which were just down a short hallway from our room.
There weren't any windows in the shower room, which was a pity. It would have been nice to see outside, but I guess since humans are embarrassed when they don't have clothes on it made sense. Just the same, it felt kind of confining to me, but I could mostly ignore it. Aquamarine didn't look all that bothered by it.
We put our shower supplies back in the room and checked on the unicorns, but they were both still asleep, so we decided to get some exercise by walking up and down the length of the train.
The passages between cars are kind of scary, because the two cars are moving relative to each other, so if you're ground-bound you have to judge carefully. There are little doors with pressure plates that you have to push before you can cross into them, so you can't accidentally wander into a between-car passage.
All the way in the back, the door didn't open, but we could stand up on our hind hooves and watch the ground zip by behind us. It was kind of dizzying, seeing all the crossties blur away. But it was a really nice view, not limited to one side or the other like our room was.
It really would have been something to be sitting in the locomotive, but I didn't think we'd be allowed to do that.
We passed by a train on a side-track—it was going the same direction we were, but not as fast. I waved out my window when I saw the locomotive, and to my surprise the man inside waved back at me.
The two of us might have stayed there all day but Miss Parker finally found us, and invited us to breakfast, and we followed her forward to the dining car.
We'd finished our meal and gone back to Miss Parker and Mister Barrow's room when the train stopped for a while in Minot. That was another long stop, so we all got out and walked the platform until the conductor said it was time to get back on the train.
On both sides of the train was farmland. Gusty thought it was boring, but Aquamarine liked it because she likes farms, and I liked how big and open it was. I don't know what Cayenne thought of it; she was using her computer to look at Facebook.
We'd had a couple of hours to ourselves when Mister Barrow and Miss Parker came down and asked if they could sit with us for a little bit. Mister Barrow said that he was going to tell us a bit about the train, which would be interesting.
He told us that the train used to be run by the Great Northern Railroad but then the railroads had started to lose money on the passenger trains because people were taking trips by car or by airplane, and then all the passenger trains wound up being run by Amtrak, and it had been that way for over forty years.
I asked him if the Great Northern Railroad still had any trains, and he shook his head and said that they had become part of the Burlington Northern, which had then become part of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, or BNSF, and those were the trains we would see now.
He told us that tomorrow, we'd want to get up to the Viewliner car early so that we could get a good view as we went through the Cascades, which were a mountain range. During the summer, we would have gotten a really good look at Glacier National Park, but we'd be passing it at night—and we'd pass over the Rocky Mountains at night as well.
Gusty thought it was odd that more people didn't like trains. It was a lot roomier than an airplane, and a lot nicer inside, too. She'd noticed that people were really jammed into their seats, and some people even had to crouch to walk through the aisles in the airplane, but the train was taller. She said that she didn't like cars all that much, either.
Aquamarine didn't mind cars (and I didn't, either). I thought that they were comfy inside, and it was a fun way to get where you were going. I asked Gusty if she had ever been on a road trip, and she shook her head.
Cayenne said that in Chicago, there were lots of trains to take you where you wanted to go. It was called “Metra,” and she said that was how she'd gotten to the train station to get on the Empire Builder. She thought they were better, because in a taxi or Uber-car, you were limited in how many of your friends you could fit in, but there was no practical limit on the trains. Plus, she said that a lot of the train terminals had musicians performing.
The land outside the train had gotten hilly and there were a lot of small ponds and lakes scattered as far as the eye could see. They were all covered in ice, but you could tell that they were there, because there were flat spots in the rolling land.
In Williston, there was a steam locomotive and a caboose that both said Great Northern on them. I suppose they had been left over after the Great Northern became the Burlington Northern. But then Cayenne said that humans kept old machines in museums and sometimes if they were big outside where people could look at them and admire them.
Just before lunch, we passed into Montana. There weren't any signs announcing it, like there were on the highway, and we wouldn't have known if Mister Barrow hadn't said something about it. The land had gotten really hilly around us, and we'd go long stretches without seeing any human civilization besides roads, and then we'd come upon a little town, and then we were back in near-wilderness.
The train made another service stop in Havre, and we all got out. It was colder than it had been in Michigan, and even with her clothes, Gusty decided that she needed another layer and went back inside. I was a bit chilly, too, and kinda regretting that I'd had my coat groomed.
After a while, Montana started to look the same, and we spent a little less time looking out the windows and a little more time talking about our experiences on Earth. Cayenne told us about the museums she visited on the weekends and the different clubs she went to at night. Gusty had a bunch of funny stories to tell about theatre people, most of which were about things going wrong on stage and people forgetting their cues. Aquamarine told us about all the different fields and barns and stuff that Michigan State has, and also about the basketball games she'd been to, and I told them about flying around Kalamazoo.
After dinner—which was pretty much the same as it had been last night—we all sat around Cayenne's folding computer and we took turns showing pictures of friends that were on Facebook. I didn't think I'd find that many of me, but Cayenne told me that if the pictures were tagged with my name, the computer could find them, and sure enough it did. I kind of blushed when I found a video of me rolling around in the snow, but the video of me giving a ponyback ride at Val Day made up for it.
Then when Aquamarine was taking her turn, Cayenne found a picture of her at the horse stables standing next to an unsheathed stallion. Cayenne's jaw dropped at the size of him, and Gusty got really embarrassed and turned away.
It wasn't too long after that we started talking about our sex lives on campus, and we decided that we needed to have some drinks for that. Well, Gusty thought so, and I wasn't going to turn down the bottle of wine she offered, so we passed it around and talked about doing it with humans.
Cayenne had the most to tell; she'd been to lots of parties and had figured out how to get boys interested in her. Gusty had met a girl she really, really liked and she wouldn't say any more than that. I told them about Aric, and Aquamarine said that she'd managed to score with one boy after a party but that had been it, and it hadn't been all that satisfying because he was drunk and didn't last very long.
We played another round of euchre after that, and then everyone got ready for bed so that we could get to the Viewliner car early. When Gusty got undressed, I noticed that she was wearing underwear, too, and that struck me as really odd. I thought about saying something, but that wouldn't have been polite.