This is not a travel guide. Why? Because you can’t read a travel guide from cover to cover. But you can read Mary Jane’s travel memoir of the USA for fun as well as information. The book begins with a guest historical chapter, and then tumbles directly into a flowing narrative of Mary Jane’s travels around the continental USA and Hawaiʻi.
Mary Jane has been visiting the USA since the 1990s and travelled right around the continental USA by Amtrak train in the autumn and winter of 2016 and 2017. Not only was she confronted by politics during the height of the 2016 election season, but also discovered environmental and social issues along the way.
– Mary Jane took the train to the Glacier, Grand Teton, Yosemite and Rocky Mountains National Parks before the snow hit.
– She loved the Smithsonian museums and after seeing a dance at the Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC, she decided to go to Standing Rock.
– Standing Rock was a protest over land rights and drinking water, at 30 below zero!
– Mary Jane was awed by Chicago architecture, by an Art Deco Detroit which is reverting into a park, by Galveston and by Birmingham, Alabama.
– She was in America for the election and was not surprised Trump won.
– She was tired of being mistaken for a homeless person because she wore a back pack, and left San Francisco because of it.
– And she took in Hawaiʻi (the northernmost apex of the Polynesian Triangle) on the way back to her home in New Zealand, the southernmost.