A three-day solo trip aboard Canyon Spirit was built around unplugging—no WiFi on board. But as DocuSign contracts for a Los Angeles house deal moved forward and a messy legal situation required detailed home records, the writer’s son fell ill, leaving her hus
She boarded Canyon Spirit knowing the whole point was to slow down—meals served right at her seat, domed glass railcars built for panoramic views, and snowy Colorado landscapes giving way to Utah’s red rock canyons.
Then the train left her without WiFi, entirely by design.
For a person who keeps her laptop and phone close—because she’s a freelance journalist and travel writer who wants the option to squeeze in 15 minutes of work while waiting anywhere. and because she wants to be available to her kids in an emergency—“unplugging” wasn’t just a lifestyle concept. It was a boundary she was asked to cross just as her real life kept accelerating back home.
The trip spans three days and was intentionally designed to encourage presence. Outside her window, the Colorado River ran alongside the route for hours. The atmosphere was serene. But the timing was brutal: she needed to be reachable at the exact moment she couldn’t be.
At home, her husband and she were negotiating an offer on a potential new house back in Los Angeles. The paperwork and decisions were moving through DocuSign contracts and discussions about contingencies—what could be the biggest purchase of their lives.
On top of that, there was unrelated drama involving their current house. That mess required keeping detailed communications logs for a possible future legal case.
And then, with the week already stretched thin, her son came down with a fever and vomiting.
The result was not the quiet, reflective trip she expected to take. It landed her in a strange two-world rhythm: out on the train’s observation deck. other passengers stepped outside to admire dramatic scenery and breathe in mountain air. while she held her phone toward the sky trying to get her T-Mobile satellite feature to work. She felt it was likely not the intended use case for those spectacular open-air decks.
She didn’t say she fully unplugged—she couldn’t. She checked in when possible and handled what she could remotely. In pockets of connectivity, she provided updates on her next expected WiFi patch.
Still, she said she felt awful about the timing and carried an “extremely generous helping of guilt and worry” as everything unfolded at home.
When connectivity failed her, she learned to accept it. At many stages, she simply sat quietly and stared out the window longer than she normally would. She noticed the landscape’s dramatically changing colors. She caught the resin-rich smell of pine at higher elevations. She exchanged perspectives with fellow travelers over meals and drinks—human moments that replaced the constant. digital availability she’d been used to.
The competing pressures never disappeared: there was stress waiting for her back home. and she couldn’t do much about it. But being removed from her usual options changed the rhythm of her days. and she ended up carrying that stress through red-rock canyons and snow-covered mountains instead of through another ordinary week of multitasking.
She didn’t return home transformed into someone who wanted to disappear into the wilderness and live off the grid. She also didn’t frame the trip as a failure.
For her, the lesson was less about quitting technology forever and more about being forced—however reluctantly—to loosen her grip for a little while.
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