Oh man, yeah. You can take the train to Montreal, or through Niagara Falls to Toronto for about the same price and trip time as it would take to drive there. Those aren’t long trips from Boston, but at destinations like those, you can blow all the time and money you want. 😀
The easiest way to do a major US train trip is probably to purchase a USA RailPass,
which lets you break up your trip into 8 or more stops/transfers (the more segments, the more expensive the pass). You can use
Amtrak’s travel planning map (find it on the front page of the Amtrak site; I love this thing, it’s such a help) to scope out a route and then check out
what stops you’d like to make along the way.
For a 7 day break: one of the best trips of my life was taking the Crescent down to New Orleans. Travel was a bit over 40 hours all told from Pennsylvania, including a transfer at Penn Station. I stayed in New Orleans for a few days and then headed north to Chicago, deliberately built in a long layover for a day visit, and then headed back east (including the layover, I think this ended up being around 50 hours). The thing about the Crescent is that the train attendants are amazing. Train attendants tend to hail from the regions their route passes through, so they have a lot of regional pride and knowledge. These guys told us stories about the places we stopped and generally took spectacular care of us because they knew it was a long haul and they were mostly Southern (Southern hospitality is not a joke), and train travel is incredibly low pressure so they weren’t suffering from customer service fatigue. (Train people tend to be really loyal to and proud of train travel, I suspect for this reason.) The NOLA trip would be
great with a RailPass, because you pass through Philadelphia, DC, Charlotte,
Atlanta, and a lot of other cool places along the way. Also, honestly, New Orleans is ALL THAT. By mid-March, things should be thawing out and beginning to bloom in the south, too, so you can get a jump-start on spring.
PS: If you want to stay in a hotel in NOLA, I’ll recommend the Hotel St. Marie. It’s smack in the middle of the French Quarter, remarkably affordable, has utterly lovely service and while it’s not as swanky as some of the big name places, it’s really well-kept and old-fashioned charming.
A trip I planned out years back and haven’t gotten around to taking yet is out to Glacier National Park. Mid-March would be a perfect time to do this because Glacier is supposed to be incredible in the snow, but it won’t be, you know, January in the Rockies by then. This route takes you out through Chicago across the northern US, which is some crazy beautiful scenery. It’d be more expensive than the NOLA trip, though.
Or you could just pick a destination, and then stop at a bunch of places in between. If you’re heading from Boston down to the Gulf Coast or out past the Mississsippi, the trip is going to take you at least 48 hours anyway, so you may as well break it up and visit some of the cool places in between. 😀
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