Sean Dengler. PHOTO BY SOREN M. PETERSON

When I knew I was not going to farm anymore, I needed to cheer myself up. I decided to ride Amtrak. Due to a bomb cyclone cancelling my ride from Seattle to St. Paul, I ended up riding the California Zephyr from Emeryville, Calif. to Omaha. As a child, my mom and I rode a partial version of this route to Winter Park, Colo. and back to Iowa. That experience has always stuck with me.

After flying to San Francisco, the journey started in the suburb of Emeryville. After a ride through a few cities and departing Sacramento, the route enters the Sierra Nevada around lunch time. Enjoying a delicious chicken Caesar salad while it was snowing in the mountains is a sight to behold. It felt like a movie. In the afternoon, the train descended into Nevada. A new landscape with wide valleys between colorful red bluffs and various grasses along the way emerged from the snow-covered pine trees of the mountains.

Traversing Nevada and Utah through the night, the Zephyr pulled in Colorado the next morning. The observatory car was the place to be. Passing through the Rockies and into canyons with the cleanest water flowing in the stream below, the views were spectacular. As the train passed through these mountains where the northernly side was already covered in snow, the vibrant colors still this late in fall existed. The view was perfect, almost too perfect. It felt like a Bob Ross painting, a model train set, or a diorama. It is everything one wants to see when traveling through the unimpeded forces of nature.

The trip was well worth it. While I advocate for anyone to go on this route, the more important part is the why. This train ride was something I put off for a long time. While I could have thrown up my arms in defeat when the bomb cyclone cancelled my train ride, I did not. It was worth the hassle and encouragement from my wife to pursue this dream. It was rewarding. Go pursue whatever it is you have been putting off. Maybe it is a trip, authoring a book, or cleaning the gutters (if you get satisfaction from that task – I do not, but more power to you if you do).

Do something you want to do. No one knows what tomorrow will bring. It is worth pursuing today. You will not regret it.

Sean Dengler is a writer, comedian, farmer, and host of the Pandaring Talk podcast who grew up on a farm between Traer and Dysart. You can reach him at sean.h.dengler@gmail.com.