![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aIt's been twenty years since I rode the Coast Starlight, an Amtrak train that runs from Seattle to Los Angeles. K. and I took it down to San Luis Obispo, when one of her cousins got married in nearby Harmony (population: 18).
Apparently the Coast Starlight has had a whole fall and rise in the twenty years since. In the several years after our trip to SLO, the Starlight's on-time performance dropped to 2%(!!) and it was regularly running 5-11 hours behind. It became the Coast Starlate (snark not mine).
Thankfully, we didn't see that level of chaos on our Harmony trip.
Everyone seemed to agree that you should get to the Amtrak station 30 minutes early, and more for their busy stations. The Amtrak web site agreed: 45 minutes at Emeryville, even if you were already ticketed and had no baggage to check in.
So I dutifully showed up at 7.30 or so for my 8.20 train.
And the station was jammed. As I started looking at the boards I saw that there were three Capitol Corridor trains due soon, the first about 2 hours late, the first about an hour late, and the last about 10 minutes late.
@*)(#$@.
A message soon ran that said that the delays were due to a "UP freight vehicle strike". And I was like @#*$(), if there's some sort of union strike, we might be having serious problems there and back (because Amtrak runs on the UP's track through most of California).
It turns out that I was confusing my strikes. A UP train hit a vehicle in Davis last night. So trains were delayed up through that 8.10 train or so. Our Starlight came in 10 minutes late or so, but we made that up in the trip over to Oakland. And then lost it during a very long stop so that they could load on "private cars". Which I assume are full of drunk, dot-commers.
And showing up 45 minutes early: totally not necessary. You walk in to Emeryville, you walk out to the tracks, and you hop on the train. So you probably need to be early enough to have a margin for error, but that's about it.
The trip is 10 hours long, but oh that boarding interface was so much more convenient than at the airports, where our gov't has dug sinkholes of misery in the last 20 years. And the seats are oh so comfortable, with enough leg room that I can actually put my legs up on a bar on the seat in front of me.
And I rode business, so I had wifi (which was critical) and I was also in a quiet car that was only partially full. We were sandwiched between the dining car (ahead of us) and the cafe/siteseeing car (behind us), so we were largely isolated from the proles.
On the other hand we got delays that you wouldn't have on airlines. There was that delay in Oakland to add the private cars, and then in Hayward we had to wait for a big, fast train to go by in the opposite direction. We were running 45 minutes late by the time we hit San Jose. But we were only two minutes behind by the time we reach San Luis Obispo and reached Santa Barbara on time.
I've gotten pretty good at plane flights over the last decade, but that's because I treat them like a marathon. I pile myself up with things to write and things to read and then I bull through them, whether I want to or not.
The train ride was totally different. In fact, I got very little reading and writing done; the 10 hours just drifted away.
Part of that was good companionship. Chris was taking the same train as me. He and I wandered over to the siteseeing car once to talk business without disturbing anyone and another couple of times to see sites from the site-seeing car. It was great. Though I'd explicitly taken the train, in part, so that I could see the California landscape one more time, I'd really neglected the fact that it wasn't just a passive activity, but rather something that I could immerse myself in, as the mountains floated by.
It was almost like hiking, but without getting my kidney stone going.
Mind you, the "coast" in the Coast Starlight is a bit of a misnomer. There is just under two hours of coast between San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara, but there's another seven and a half hours of track that are not. Still, those non-coastal vistas were very attractive (and so was the coast when we finally got there).
And beyond that, riding on a train feels like real life, in a way that being crammed on a plane doesn't. We had a nice lunch. And then we later played most of a game of Catan with some visitors from Boston. (Ironically, we'd talked to them in the site-seeing car earlier, when we'd seen them playing, then we ended up seated with them for lunch, then we gamed with them up until their dinner and our arrival in Santa Barbara, so we spent almost two hours with them all said and done.)
Another reason that trains feel like real-life: because you actually talk to people. I talked with the gentleman who got on with me in Berkeley ... until he drove us away with his cell phone calls. We talked with those Cataners. We talked with a woman in the site-seeing car who was convinced there was other track west of us, because she was certain that she'd been right on the water when she'd taken another train north. (There was nothing west of us at this time but sand, ice plants, and waves.)
Another surprise: the food was genuinely good! I had a good black bean and corn burger and a terrific chocolate raspberry tart that I must repeat on our return trip.
Overall: definitely the right choice to take the train down! It was just a pleasant day!
Arriving in Santa Barbara we walked 1.5 miles toward the hills on the quickly darkening streets. Close to the Ocean, everything looked like Carmel, Monterey, and every other coastal Californian town that I've seen. As we approached the foothills and some more more residential areas, it became less fancy, but still pleasant enough.
Our AirBnB was unreasonably cheap, and that always makes me a little nervous. But, the pictures looked nice, and I didn't have much choice just a few days before our event (after I got back my CT scan last week, and I felt like I could really commit to going).
But, it seems nice enough. It's spacious, well upkept, and clean. The actual bones of the building are dull. It reminds me of a four-plex that my dad used to live in, which was pragmatic, not fancy. But, so what.
That marks the AirBnB as a big success for me. It gives me the privacy that I always want, and the space that I wanted in case I ended up in lots of pain again. And it was cheaper than the hotel, and only a hair further.
Our Rebooting the Web of Trust design workshop begins tomorrow.
Apparently the Coast Starlight has had a whole fall and rise in the twenty years since. In the several years after our trip to SLO, the Starlight's on-time performance dropped to 2%(!!) and it was regularly running 5-11 hours behind. It became the Coast Starlate (snark not mine).
Thankfully, we didn't see that level of chaos on our Harmony trip.
Everyone seemed to agree that you should get to the Amtrak station 30 minutes early, and more for their busy stations. The Amtrak web site agreed: 45 minutes at Emeryville, even if you were already ticketed and had no baggage to check in.
So I dutifully showed up at 7.30 or so for my 8.20 train.
And the station was jammed. As I started looking at the boards I saw that there were three Capitol Corridor trains due soon, the first about 2 hours late, the first about an hour late, and the last about 10 minutes late.
@*)(#$@.
A message soon ran that said that the delays were due to a "UP freight vehicle strike". And I was like @#*$(), if there's some sort of union strike, we might be having serious problems there and back (because Amtrak runs on the UP's track through most of California).
It turns out that I was confusing my strikes. A UP train hit a vehicle in Davis last night. So trains were delayed up through that 8.10 train or so. Our Starlight came in 10 minutes late or so, but we made that up in the trip over to Oakland. And then lost it during a very long stop so that they could load on "private cars". Which I assume are full of drunk, dot-commers.
And showing up 45 minutes early: totally not necessary. You walk in to Emeryville, you walk out to the tracks, and you hop on the train. So you probably need to be early enough to have a margin for error, but that's about it.
The trip is 10 hours long, but oh that boarding interface was so much more convenient than at the airports, where our gov't has dug sinkholes of misery in the last 20 years. And the seats are oh so comfortable, with enough leg room that I can actually put my legs up on a bar on the seat in front of me.
And I rode business, so I had wifi (which was critical) and I was also in a quiet car that was only partially full. We were sandwiched between the dining car (ahead of us) and the cafe/siteseeing car (behind us), so we were largely isolated from the proles.
On the other hand we got delays that you wouldn't have on airlines. There was that delay in Oakland to add the private cars, and then in Hayward we had to wait for a big, fast train to go by in the opposite direction. We were running 45 minutes late by the time we hit San Jose. But we were only two minutes behind by the time we reach San Luis Obispo and reached Santa Barbara on time.
I've gotten pretty good at plane flights over the last decade, but that's because I treat them like a marathon. I pile myself up with things to write and things to read and then I bull through them, whether I want to or not.
The train ride was totally different. In fact, I got very little reading and writing done; the 10 hours just drifted away.
Part of that was good companionship. Chris was taking the same train as me. He and I wandered over to the siteseeing car once to talk business without disturbing anyone and another couple of times to see sites from the site-seeing car. It was great. Though I'd explicitly taken the train, in part, so that I could see the California landscape one more time, I'd really neglected the fact that it wasn't just a passive activity, but rather something that I could immerse myself in, as the mountains floated by.
It was almost like hiking, but without getting my kidney stone going.
Mind you, the "coast" in the Coast Starlight is a bit of a misnomer. There is just under two hours of coast between San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara, but there's another seven and a half hours of track that are not. Still, those non-coastal vistas were very attractive (and so was the coast when we finally got there).
And beyond that, riding on a train feels like real life, in a way that being crammed on a plane doesn't. We had a nice lunch. And then we later played most of a game of Catan with some visitors from Boston. (Ironically, we'd talked to them in the site-seeing car earlier, when we'd seen them playing, then we ended up seated with them for lunch, then we gamed with them up until their dinner and our arrival in Santa Barbara, so we spent almost two hours with them all said and done.)
Another reason that trains feel like real-life: because you actually talk to people. I talked with the gentleman who got on with me in Berkeley ... until he drove us away with his cell phone calls. We talked with those Cataners. We talked with a woman in the site-seeing car who was convinced there was other track west of us, because she was certain that she'd been right on the water when she'd taken another train north. (There was nothing west of us at this time but sand, ice plants, and waves.)
Another surprise: the food was genuinely good! I had a good black bean and corn burger and a terrific chocolate raspberry tart that I must repeat on our return trip.
Overall: definitely the right choice to take the train down! It was just a pleasant day!
Arriving in Santa Barbara we walked 1.5 miles toward the hills on the quickly darkening streets. Close to the Ocean, everything looked like Carmel, Monterey, and every other coastal Californian town that I've seen. As we approached the foothills and some more more residential areas, it became less fancy, but still pleasant enough.
Our AirBnB was unreasonably cheap, and that always makes me a little nervous. But, the pictures looked nice, and I didn't have much choice just a few days before our event (after I got back my CT scan last week, and I felt like I could really commit to going).
But, it seems nice enough. It's spacious, well upkept, and clean. The actual bones of the building are dull. It reminds me of a four-plex that my dad used to live in, which was pragmatic, not fancy. But, so what.
That marks the AirBnB as a big success for me. It gives me the privacy that I always want, and the space that I wanted in case I ended up in lots of pain again. And it was cheaper than the hotel, and only a hair further.
Our Rebooting the Web of Trust design workshop begins tomorrow.