[lucb1e]

Subtitling for the non-americans (things I had to look up):

- Amtrak: "national passenger railroad company of the United States" "receives a combination of state and federal subsidies but is managed as a for-profit organization"

- VIA: Canadian rail operator (and a ton of other things, but this is my best guess)

- Turtle Island: "a name for Earth or North America" (heh)

- Greyhound stop: greyhound is a bus company

- hobo: poor person traveling by train hopping. (My dutch brain wanted to read it as "hol-bewoner", cave-dweller, since the word stress works out to emphasize the same sounds and given the context of perhaps arriving disheveled or so, but good that I looked up the right connotation)

[alisonatwork]

Amusingly, I am also non-American, although I have lived and traveled there quite a bit.

I use Turtle Island as a shorthand for "the US and Canada", since it is/was a term used by indigenous peoples who lived in the area that's now split by that border. It feels a bit less inaccurate to me than saying "North America" when you are not including Mexico.