America -one small corner.

Being in USA is a strange experience: on the one hand there are all the trappings of modern life to the max, on the other the [episcopal] church seems strangely 1950's in so many ways. It's seems odd to see so many church buildings [and so many of them varieties of Baptist]. They seem to get really excited about simple creativity in worship and about clergy who seem to be somewhat relaxed socially and liturgically informal.

Our biggest note is how hard it wold be to live here without a car [which I/we don't have in UK]. A society with little public transport outside of metropolitan areas and it structures lifestyles and everyday unnoticed choices; the amount of space taken up by a relatively small population is interesting. Perhaps it more closely mirrors the ecological footprint in real physical space rather than the statistical space which measures a European eco-footprint. We have seen few pedestrians outside of twsn and cities and we feel like the car is king. Towns are more noticibly structured with out of town shopping and small niche shops in the centre. It becomes easy to understand how hard it is to contemplate weaning this nation off fossil carbon. It will have to be done by pricing and policy; the social imagination to do things otherwise is just not there [nor is it in England and I increasingly think of the south of England as reflecting the same car-based social structuring].

We chose to travel from Washington by train. A journey that would have taken about 2 hours in UK by train took 3-4 hours [allowing for an hours late departure -jokes indicate this may not be unusual]. It's a puzzle as to why the train seems not to exceed the road speed limit. Still the compensation is that the thing is set up to deal with long journeys: big seats, lots of leg-room, waht seem to be excessive amounts of on-board crew who count you off [presumably to rescue sleeping passengers from the inconvenience of waking up hundreds of miles from their stop and having to wait a day for a train back the other way]. We reckoned Amtrak carriages at European speeds would be brilliant. just needs a US train entrepreneur to make it happen and they could give the ar=irlines a run for their money.