Roll through my chant…

Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy beat convulsive;
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel;
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides;
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar—now tapering in the distance;
Thy great protruding head-light, fix’d in front;
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple;
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack;
Thy knitted frame—thy springs and valves—the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels;
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily-following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering:
Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!
For once, come serve the Muse, and merge in verse, even as here I see thee[…]

Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant, with all thy lawless music! thy swinging lamps at night;
Thy piercing, madly-whistled laughter! thy echoes, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing
all!
~from Walt Whitman, “To a Locomotive in Winter”

One of the best parts of my trip was that I traveled (and traveled and traveled) by train. I took high-speed trains from Brussels to Avignon, from there to Paris, and also to London and back. I’ve said before that I try to make sure that every single journey I take includes a ride on a train, and this one certainly didn’t disappoint! Some of my train trips even included spontaneous cheese-bread-waffle picnics like this one:

(And because I fear that I’ve spoken far too much about my wine-bibbing on this trip already on my blog, the beverage in my glass will remain unmentioned…but were I to mention it, I might note just how strange it felt to be allowed to drink such stuff on public transport…)

And…as a further indulgence for my train fetish, I also had the opportunity to visit and photograph a few antique cars near an old railway-station-turned-coffeehouse. I’m rather embarrassed to admit just how much I enjoyed that part of my adventure…