Fresno to Orange Beach, Ala., to attend a wedding, if you must know, and I have chosen the cheapest possible route between the two cities, which is always a good idea, like choosing the cheapest possible heart monitor.

This trip contains the following means of transportation: Taxi. Train. Bus. BART. Plane. And finally, rental car.

That's just the trip out.

Normally, I would be whining and looking for my cell phone and panicking and asking the woman next to me if she can spare a few of those pills. Don't care what they do. Just give me one. I'm kidding. Make it seven.

But I'm excited about this. This is my first trip without my truck. I sold it recently because $3 gas is wrong, in the same way the designated hitter is wrong. And more than that, I was tired of being one of those people who complained about something and didn't do anything about it. Now, I'm a man of action. I'm Teddy Roosevelt. I'm Superman. I'm exaggerating. I'm Gandhi. Wait, was he a man of action or inaction? Either way, I'm doing something.

People do this all the time. People live entire lives without cars. Smart people. People with PhDs who discuss theater. People who spell it "theatre." People who contemplate life and sip coffee and read obscure books. I'm one of those people now, minus the PhD and the contemplating.

There are two other exciting aspects to this trip. First, I've always wanted to fly back in time. You know, take a flight that crosses a time zone and actually lands before it took off. Tomorrow morning, I will be on a flight that leaves Atlanta at 8:24 a.m. and lands in Pensacola, Fla., at 8:33 a.m. OK, it isn't back in time, but it's a 9-minute flight from Atlanta to Pensacola. That's efficiency. That's time saved. I could do something important with time like that. Go to an arcade and leave with a good prize.

Secondly, I'm riding in a train right now, which is always fun. It's slow, no doubt, but the scenery is always better than planes, where really only the take-off and landing are noteworthy.

And you can sit here and imagine what it was like 100 years ago. OK, I'm typing on a laptop and listening to an MP3 player, but still, there's a pioneer spirit in my lungs. I'm thinking we might see a herd of buffaloes, and when was the last time I even thought about buffaloes? People actually talk on trains. On what other mode of mass transportation do people have conversations of substance? There's a guy 10 or 12 rows up who was reading my column in today's Bee and I walked by and freaked him out. Now, I know that he and his wife once took a train trip around the entire country. Merced to Merced.

There's also Babe Ruth. Every time I'm on a train I think about Babe Ruth and wonder what he and his teammates used to talk about when they rode from city to city. Did they think that 80 years later, he would still be a legend? The Babe. Did they know there would be nicknames and candy bars and this mythical stature that would last through another world war and the Internet and the invention of Stove Top Stuffing?

I wish they were here to see Barry Bonds stand on top of the plate with his inflated muscles protected by a big arm guard. Would they consider him a showman, like the Babe, or a joke?

So much to contemplate. So much time.