Car vs train across the United States

There's nothing for it but to keep going, so we do. Out of the saw-toothed majesty of the Rockies, down and through a martian landscape of flat-topped mesas, across a vast plain where the sun crashes through the cloud like a still-life explosion. The scenery changes every 100 miles or so, flipping from one film set to another. We drive for three hours, fill the cars with fuel, repeat. Price, Spanish Fork, Provo, Orem and up towards Salt Lake City. Dusk is starting to crowd our vision, and things are getting slightly ropey.

We duck south of the Great Salt Lake, grab an In-N-Out burger and strike out west again, but suddenly, all four of us are sucker-punched by fatigue. We're down to 20-minute stints each. More back-of-fag-packet calculations about train times and distances, mental arithmetic made virtually impossible by the simple time-zone changes and extreme tiredness. It's like trying to think through treacle. In the V8, we spend over an hour trying to calculate how long we can pause before the rest of the journey becomes pointless. Dan starts seeing green-eyed dogs in the desert and idly wonders why "all those lights are on poles".