29th November, 23:17

Aha! and you had all thought some horrible catastrophe had enveloped me. No fear, I've been on the train for 9 hours now... out of 55. Luckily, I met a cool american guy called Wade, who is sitting next to me. By his own admission he's a bit red neck, but is really nice and chatty. He has teh sort of personality that he always repeats how he respects everyone and not to judge people, but at the back of your mind you suspect if you got in his bad books he could flip out. While the sun was gingerly creeping down the sky I relaxed with him in the lounge car and met a jolly nice American called Josh. We all chatted for a while where I found out nuggest of info like they had both been druggies but cleaned up etc. Wade had recently found his best mate dead from an overdose and that had had a profound affect on him. Josh in turn had lost people, but I liked Josh's outlook and he seemed pretty knowledgeable about Britain and History etc.

Wade's reason for travel (to Grand Junction) was to find work at a gas rig as teh demand for tree-climbing tree reducers had diminished. Josh seemed to be going to Sacramento, or there aboust, to join the army. But his shape and secretly Wade, begged to differ. After returning to our, once again, spacious seats we struck up conversation with an english girl, Jane, and Rebecca, and American, sitting to our right. After general chatting we headed to the bar for some beers, where after some depressing drug/death talk, and Wade trying to playing match maker with me and Jane, he headed on up to hang with some other people he met.

Jane (24), it turned out, had been travelling on and off for 5 years, taking a gap year before uni in Africa. When she was meant to go home she decided to stay and has travelling/worked all over the world ever since. Including working in New Zealand, Oz etc. she's now on her way to Denver to work down the country. One of the reason's wade was so up for matchmaking us was, obviously us Britishness, but also our love for Jack Kerouac, who ironically the two American's had never heard of. She also lives in Glastonbury, so we chatted about the festival for a while.

I garnered less info from the quiet Rebecca (23), she works on her family farm, I think. If she could do anything, she'd be a botanist in South Americ, and she has some crazy herbal drinks. She's really nice though and she also handed out some awesome dark chocolate, which Wade had never had and he pretended he like it, even though he hated it. He couldn't believe I loved it.

A few more interesting things to note about wade, he had this barbed wire tattoo around his bicep, which was surrounded by knife stab wounds, apparently done by guy who tattooed it!? He wore cowboy boots that he was very protective over, even though they'd been run over by his girlfriend. Who had also got a DUI and killed someone while drink driving recently. Twas a bit hectic.

In conclusion, journey is good so far, but I'm far too awake while veryone else is asleep. Wade has gone to stretch out somewhere up front and I've resorted to the sounds of Long Island's Brand New flooding into my ears. They guys asked me if I had enough money and could do whatever I wanted what would I do. For some reason I said writer. From this post's 3 page length, I can't for the life of me see why. Plus my handwriting is dreadful.

29th November, 11:00

It would appear I forgot to write down what I did last night. After the awesome Planetarium night sky show and more playing around the exhibits I participated in an El (subway) fiasco, but eventually got to the Lincoln Park area. After realising it was too dark to actually go to the park I ventured up the main shopping part, which was full of hyper expensive, independent, small fashion shops. I also was entirely unsure of the general area as the lighting wasn't fantastically illuminating and I didn't know what the neighbourhood was like. I found a Starbucks though, where I finished my Manga book. Yeah, so manga is very expensive for it's content. I'm not saying it was bad, just short and ended rather abruptly. I then tried to walk to an el station, got a bit off course, aimed for a different one, which turned out to be shut, so had to carry on walking through neighbourhoods that I had a severe lack of knowledge about. It all ended up groovy though, and I walked down the mag. mile for the last time and had a gargantuan Jimmy John's.

When I got back I packed and sorted everything out for the train ride. The night's sleep was pretty bad as loads of people snored and people came in late, banging around. I slept in a bit and then cruised the net for cool N810 apps.