How to get to Montana and other transport adventures on the Mainland. Just the route, transport, how to get there, and where to book. The first flight, international: Moscow-Rome-New York, June 26-27, 2008.

I was dropped off at Sheremetyevo 9 hours before the flight (I'm not from Moscow). After napping and lugging my bags around, I chatted with some students who were also flying and had an even longer wait. Later, I made my way closer to the Alitalia counter and met my fellow passengers.

I had never flown so far, but the flight turned out to be quite fun (thanks to the random travel companions!), tasty, sleepy, and slightly tipsy. (Alitalia is the only airline I remember that freely puts wine and other drinks in the bar—the nightstand by the restrooms). The more we drank, the more we slept, and the closer we got to the promised land.

After this flight and a similar one back home, I started to dislike Italians. Rude, boorish, insanely noisy, scattering things, littering, pushing, cackling—they turned out to be extremely unpleasant companions.

We landed in New York without any particular joy. Tired and exhausted, we lined up to have some note-form attached to our passports (I-94; by the way, they should ideally staple it, but they just shoved it into my passport, and it kept getting lost among other documents...). The American in the booth with the forms turned out to be rude, chewing gum, and arrogant, but he signed it and let me through.

Here I first encountered the 'yellow line,' which Americans strictly adhere to almost everywhere, even in stores where they behave like barbarians (no other word fits; go visit, walk into the clothing department of some Macy's and you'll see ). You shouldn't step over it until the person in front of you has finished their business. Then there was wandering around Terminal 4, finally discovering the AirTrain, and finally getting into the city, but that's another story :)

The second flight, domestic, ill-fated:

To begin with, everything was just against me, and I couldn't leave for a whole week. Planes weren't flying, buses weren't running, trains weren't moving. The small town on the Canadian border seemed like a bastion without civilization... And this is in America, where, in essence, everything is available everywhere.

When we went to the bus station and stood in a huge line among dark-skinned people, I was sent to the trains. When we tried to buy me a train ticket, they were surprised that such a town even existed, and after finding it on the map, they sent me to register the ticket for a train that supposedly had a station two hours away. It turned out that tickets had to be booked more than a week in advance, and of course, there were none left.

The person who was voluntarily helping me drag myself around for these tickets would occasionally add sadly: 'Lin, maybe it's not meant to be?'

And when I finally despaired, I went to the Manhattan Public Library, wrote an email to my employer and parents that I wasn't going to that town, bought a local AT&T SIM card (which, by the way, worked everywhere except my Montana!, so it turned out to be quite useless throughout my stay), and called my friends to say I was staying in NY. Then a boy called me who also had an offer in my village and had bought a plane ticket to Billings (5 hours by car from Plentywood).

Then my conscience got the better of me, and I couldn't do anything calmly because I had promised my employer, had been having lovely correspondence with her, and just generally given my word. So I decided to get there at any cost.

Sometimes their servers for buying and ordering tickets, as well as in stores, cannot read our cards (I had VTB24), and I couldn't buy a plane ticket. On the last day, when 3 other Russian students—including the one with the ticket—said they could buy me a ticket, I was practically already sitting on my suitcases from Moscow. And on 07/03/08, sometime in the morning, I received an SMS from a Russian number saying they had bought me a ticket for 260 (I think dollars) and that the flight was tomorrow. Get ready. And that was it.

In the evening we went for a walk around the city, to the Brooklyn Bridge, and the next day by 11 a.m. I was packed and waiting for a call or SMS—where to go, which airport, and at what time?

But nothing followed. An hour passed, then another, my nerves were failing, and the strap of my bag started to look like chewed gum not of the first freshness in my fidgeting fingers. Somewhere around one o'clock, an SMS arrived saying the flight was at 17:20, don't be late, and then silence again—the subscriber is unavailable, and that's it. JFK or LaGuardia, not to mention terminals and the name of the airline—nothing. Fun. 4 hours until the flight, and it's unclear where to go.

Anxiety was replaced by a kind of healthy indifference—it's their own fault, they don't say anything; if the money burns, I won't give anything back. No reason to behave like that. If I smoked, I probably would have lit up at that moment. However, another SMS came: LaGuardia, 17:20.

Well, okay, whatever, I took the subway, transferred to a bus, drove through NY, which I hadn't seen yet, and was approaching the airport. When the driver asked which terminal, I replied phlegmatically:

• Uh, I don't know.
• Which airline?
• I have no idea.
• Where are you flying to?
• I don't know...
• Cool... and who are you flying with?
• With friends.
• You have 'good' friends, though...

I absolutely shared his opinion, and after consulting (with him), I decided to get out at the central terminal.

LaGuardia is a small airport, as it turned out, quite simple; if you take a cart, you can easily ride back and forth in search of 'friends' who happened to meet nearby.

Flight 4 hours to Denver, Colorado—then waiting at the airport for another 4 hours, and finally, the flight to my Montana to Billings—on a funny little helicopter-plane that stayed close to the ground, creaking, and generally very scary in the air :) although it was only 2 hours, and a night provincial airport, and a kind manager, Annette, who met us and took us under her wing.

After working in Plentywood, tickets were bought via the Internet for the Wolf Point - Seattle train (which went up in price by 10 dollars every week) for $90 (with an ISIC discount—the only time it came in handy, by the way) on the Amtrak.com website, and flights Seattle - Los Angeles ($89), Los Angeles - New York ($152).

On iec.ru/forum, a kind person recommended the site statravel.com, which saved me money.

We found the cheapest flight there, then went to the airline's website and placed the order there.

The train route lay through the picturesque nature of Western Montana with all kinds of virgin forests, a national park, a waterfall, etc., which we passed at night So I only saw the beautiful part of Montana in photos.

In general, the price is exactly proportional to how far in advance you buy the ticket, so don't delay and plan your trips 3 weeks in advance.

Trains:

Russian trains are the most 'train-like' trains in the world...

The only plus of Amtrak is that it is double-decker and short (6-7 cars). The luggage compartment, restrooms, and conductors are downstairs, and you are upstairs. And everything is fine until you go to sleep. If you travel for about a day like we did, you'll be jumping out at every stop to stretch your back. It's very cold at night, everyone scatters to empty seats and tries to spread out over a double seat (there are only sitting places in the whole train), they constantly wake up and shift around. In general, if I used to have some romance about trains, Amtrak killed it completely.

You can't buy a ticket at the station; you can only book it in advance by phone or on the Amtrak.com website; at the station itself, there is only payment and a boarding pass. In general, it's a very inconvenient system; while still in NY, we tried to book by phone—but there was only an answering machine with a lot of options, and to book for another day, you repeat the same thing for a very long time, and there is no Internet nearby anywhere.

Right there at the station, you can pick up brochures and all sorts of magazines.

From Seattle to Los Angeles, there were no incidents, except that they took away my champagne and shower gel... It's a shame, it was almost new. Although there was a bottle of water and vodka for my pierced ear in my backpack with my laptop... which, by the way, flew with me on the plane, so nobody said anything about them at all :(

We forgot to check our luggage and got on the plane with huge suitcases and were already walking to our seats when I suddenly asked the stewardess, 'Is it okay that we have such luggage?' She gasped and ran to check them in as luggage.

Los Angeles - New York turned out to be a peaceful 6-hour flight. Only there was an incident with a man of Arab appearance, about 50 years old. He was clutching his heart and saying something unintelligible. So the steward got everyone who was, let's say, non-white and asked them to talk to him—Indians, Arabs, and whoever else was there. It turned out he was Russian, only from Armenia, and his blood pressure medication had been checked in with the luggage. All this was clarified after an American stewardess with excellent Russian was found on board. And such excellent Russian that you would never say she was American. You know, when she talked to him, she used interjections and exclamations characteristic of us, like 'Oh, Lord, why don't you take care of yourself?' or 'Oh, my God, what's wrong with you?'...