It's only three and a half days from Boston to San Francisco. You leave Boston at noon on Day 1, and 24 hours later you are in Chicago waiting for your next train. From Chicago to the start of the Rocky Mountains is another day (after mercifully sleeping across Nebraska), and then you sleep across Utah and Nevada and spend Day 3 coming though the Sierra Nevadas and Lake Tahoe, down through Sacramento an into Emeryville just past dinnertime. Emeryville is a suburb of Frisco; from there Amtrak provides a bus to various points in San Francisco.  This means you get four dinners on the train.

For our third dinner, we enjoyed:

• a half-bottle of a red Marsannay (a Cotes-de-Nuits Burgundy)
• a fragrant, well-travelled, and perfectly delicious Epoisses
• a little button of herbed goat cheese provided as a good-luck gift by Peter of The Cheese Shop (Lorna's afraid of heights, so the Rocky Moutains can be trying)
• the rest of the Soppressata
• some black olives
• the last Cortland Apple

Ny now you might be thinking what an effort of will it must have been for a dedicated foodie to travel 2000 miles with a perfectly-ripe Epoisses in his luggage... But if my resolve had weakened we would have had to rely for sustenance on the Amtrak Dining Car fare - 'nuf said!