Thinking about travel in the United States, there could be somewhere close to a gazillion stories, this country is so vast and so varied. To put it in a sort of perspective: I once tried to explain to a bartender in Ireland why I was so astounded that everyone in pubs stopped talking and watched the television when the news came on - how it was to realize that Ireland was so small that ALL the national news related to everyone in some way - because the United States was so big, where I lived in Oregon was the same distance to my nation's capital as Dublin was to Moscow!

I recently traveled to the east coast, by plane to get there and back, by train and bus down the coast from New England to North Carolina. From the strange environs of a metal tube with wings launching itself through the air at incredible height and ridiculous speed, this country is reduced to its larger geographical characteristics. I was pretty sure I knew when we were over the Dakotas (though I couldn't tell you which one), vast checkerboard farmlands of the Midwest, the thousand lakes of Minnesota. But most of it was sadly anonymous.

By contrast, travel on the ground by train/bus made the fact of being somewhere not at home much more readily apparent and tangible. Even though it was a trip fraught with much delay and frustration (that's another story entirely), it was eminently more engaging.

There were the obvious clues: Views of the White House and the Smithsonian, highway signs that pointed to places I knew to be not in my home state, different license plates, different fast-food restaurant chains.

Typically trains pass along the poorer parts of towns and cities, so the view is not exactly a travelogue's best-impression. And yet, this sort of "backstage" view of places were some of the more interesting and individual. The one that shocked my small city, Pacific Northwest sensibilities was when we passed through a part of Baltimore, Maryland. The raw and gritty view of blocks of burned out and boarded up buildings (and some that probably should have been), bleached in a treeless, shadeless, sun-scrubbed bleakness that looked exactly like a television series based in these neighborhoods. To see it "for real" unexpectedly and swiftly from a train riveted me to the window, unable to take a single picture, unable to look away.

But there were more subtle and interesting place-markers as we went along: The shift from conifer and mixed forest to almost entirely deciduous woodland; the change in language and inflection of the other passengers as they joined us along the way, their vowels softening and lengthening and becoming almost three-dimensional when spoken; houses changing from the New England salt boxes to small and large farmhouses, the abundance of screened porches hinting at the humidity and insect life we were traveling toward, southbound.

I needed the swiftness of the plane to get from one coast to the other and back - and loved the familiar majesty of Mt. Hood up close and personal, a familiarity welcoming us back home at the end of the journey - but the sense of place, of being somewhere alive and individual, was only to be had by ground travel, and those moments are some that stick more clearly in my memory.