Honeymoon Trip: Day 2

We woke up early on the train and had some breakfast (scrambled eggs and bacon for me!), then headed to the Observation Car to catch all the scenery.  On the second day we would be entering Colorado, so today was the big day for beautiful views.  We had heard that seats in the Observation Car fill up fast during the portion in the Rockies, so we wanted to make sure we got some seats!

For anyone who is curious about following along on the California Zephyr route, here is a link to a play-by-play with descriptions of all the places that the train stops as well as major landmarks encountered along the way.

We rolled into Denver, and only one of us got off the train at a time so as not to lose our seats in the Observation Car.  Here is me inside the train, while Nick is outside!

Once we left Denver, we headed up into the mountains.  To give you an idea of how crazy it was with people taking pictures, I give you this:

Nick catching a picture using his tablet

Everything was pretty beautiful.  I'll place some images here so you can get an idea.  I apologize that they are mostly either blurry or they have the reflection from the train window in them.  It was hard to get a good shot, but everything was fabulous!

In the final photo, you can see that the terrain has changed.  We weren't quite into Utah yet, still Colorado, but the colors of the rocks had begun to shift and the plant life was getting more sparse and less lush.   After a while, we'd had enough of trying to snap pictures of every single gorgeous vista and we had some lunch.  For anyone who is curious, this is what the menu offering and pricing was like:

Click to enlarge!

All of our meals were included in the price of our roomette, so we never had to pay out of pocket for any meals.  Considering that we bought our $600-$900 roomette for $13.75-worth of buy-up points plus earned points one way and $206.25 in buy-up points plus earned points the other way, that's nothing to sneeze at!!  

After lunch we gave up on the Observation Car and went to take a nap in our roomette.  The train had passed through Glenwood Springs and the next stop was Grand Junction, where we got a chance to hop out of the train again.  In Grand Junction there is a beautiful old former train depot, named Pufferbelly Station, that has fallen into disrepair and is unused.  It's a shame, because it's gorgeous!  I think there are a few restoration efforts underway, but for now the building is bank-owned and waiting to be rescued.  Such a shame!

After that, we passed into Utah.  We returned to the Observation Car for a while since it looked like the scenery was spicing up again, and we heard that there would be a narrated sight-seeing portion from here until Sacramento.  

One of the sights that was pointed out was a spot on the side of the plateaus where the Colorado - Utah border is called out in writing.  Can you spy it below?

After this it was pretty much more of the same all the way to Salt Lake City.  On the way we passed through Green River, which boasts a building with the words "You Are Here" on it:

Since Utah wasn't all that interesting to us, and it had gotten dark, we called it a night and went to sleep.  Stay tuned for day 3!