Habitat for Humanity
The romance of train travel from the Lake Shore’s sightseers’ lounge continued. As the train snorted down the railroad tracks, Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous poem (1885) crossed my mind. As a child, I was fascinated by his poem:
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
Destination: Chicago
The first leg of our journey across America begins.
We walked from the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal on 8th Avenue to NY Penn station at west 31st Street to board the Lake Shore Limited, the train that would take us to Chicago.
As I sit down at my friends, Suparno-Malabika’s 12th floor apartment ‘Pineway Towers’ in Silver Spring, MD to write down the jaw-dropping and fascinating experiences of the train travel from New York to San Francisco, I am reminded of J.K. Rowling.
Rowling had a passion for train ride as her parents met on a train, she wrote. Her mother was once traveling by train and was feeling terribly cold. A stranger offered her a blanket. Later she married the guy. She always wrote about her fondness for train journeys.
As the Commander drove up the mountain, east Sikkim with its sylvan surroundings beckoned. A languid morning sun caressed the snow-capped peaks. Sleepy hamlets lazed, scattered and aloof on the undulated cascades of terraced fields.
From the window of my jeep, I watched mesmerized the magic mountain’s changing shades, criss-crossed by mist and light. It was sublimity on earth; sublimity because the intervening days have taken away nothing from that long moment of wonder. After three hours of grueling drive from Gangtok, we reached Tssango.
Solar Impulse has taken off again. After 10 months on the ground in Hawaii due to battery problems, the solar plane took off on April 21st to resume its long journey over the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco. It has two new batteries and a new cooling system. The flight will take three days and nights. The plane is flying without a single drop of fuel, powered by clean, solar technologies, to complete the crossing of the Ocean begun by André Borschberg last year.
Solar Impulse is an experimental plane whose mission is to fly around the world without fuel.
The pilots and their team plan to return to the Middle East by late summer, completing a 35,000-kilometer (27,000-mile) trip around the world. The aim of this trip is to promote clean technologies.
Your trip to Brisbane city would be absolutely incomplete without a visit to the incredibly beautiful garden which is known as Roma Street Parkland. I was fortunate to take a stroll across this spectacular garden with my cousin, a Brisbanian, during my trip to Down Under.
It’s Saturday evening. The area is chock-a-bloc with tourists and backpackers, shoppers and casual visitors. The tide of traffic at Tsim Tsa Tsui runs thick and fast. But in the hustle and bustle of the weekend crowd, one can hardly miss an essential character of the place—its vitality and vibrancy.
Welcome to Chungking Mansions at 32-44 Nathan Road in Hong Kong.
Thanks for stopping by.
