Trip Report: April 27 to May 24, 2007
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
A TWO WEEK SWING AROUND THE WEST BY AMTRAK
(AND OTHER RAILROADS)
Day 1, Friday, April 27, 2007
We often dream of being ready and packed for a trip 24 hours before departure, then just taking it easy for a day. But this trip, like all of our others, begins at the last possible moment, as we roll our luggage in the Klamath Falls Amtrak Station a half hour prior to scheduled arrival of Train 11, the southbound Coast Starlight. We just make the 30 minute deadline for checking our bags, then sit in the cab of our F-150 pickup and enjoy our brown bag dinner that we had hastily thrown together before leaving home.
Train 11 arrives 15 minutes late, which is “On-Time” out here in Union Pacific country. Carlos, the car attendant in sleeper 1131, rushes to our assistance as he sees us approaching, and quickly and efficiently loads our luggage on board into the lower lever baggage racks. Our computers are delivered to Bedroom D, which is already made up for our overnight journey to California. Our vacation finally begins, as ice is delivered to our room and we silently and smoothly pull away from the station.
The rumbling wheels quickly put us to sleep, and we don’t awaken until we are approaching Sacramento, about one hour behind schedule
Day 2, Saturday, April 28.
During a short stroll on the platform, a “Capitol” train for Oakland is boarding on the adjacent track. According to the posted schedule on the platform kiosks, this is one of 11 trains making the weekend run into Oakland, most of them going on to San Jose. During week, the number of trains increases to 16.
We enjoy breakfast in the dining car as we leave the station, cross the Sacramento River, and begin the fast run to Martinez, with a brief stop at Davis, home of the University of California at Davis. The Davis Station has been beautifully restored, with the grounds landscaped and well maintained, a reminder of photos I have seen of the florally landscaped railway stations of over a century ago in our country. The Davis Tower still stands next to the station, and once directed Southern Pacific northbound passenger trains onto the West Side line, bypassing Sacramento and Chico, while eastbound trains were directed to the Overland Route to Ogden, via Sacramento and Reno.
The Davis Station parking lot stored numerous bicycles, outnumbering cars at least by a factor of 5 to 1, attesting to the ease of navigating a bike on the flat lands of the Sacramento Delta, and to the fine weather during most of the year.
We had the omelet with a side of sausage patties, served with hash browns, a croissant, coffee, and juice. The two Canadian ladies we dined with tried out the Railroad French Toast, which they had seen on a CBC program about train travel, and were not disappointed. They were on their way from Vancouver to Los Angeles, where they planned to board a Royal Caribbean Line cruise ship doing a positioning cruise back to Vancouver, with stops in San Francisco and Victoria.
The morning Sacramento Bee was put on board at the Sacramento station stop, affording us an opportunity to keep up with the news of suicide bombings in Iraq and school shootings in the USA, including a chilling story of an intended high school double murder that was thwarted when a Regional Transit police officer made a random check of two teen boys, who were disembarking a transit vehicle. They had not purchased tickets for their ride. They could not come up with the money to buy a ticket, nor could they present any ID. They refused to answer any questions, and when the officer placed them under arrest and in handcuffs, he patted them down to find they were armed with handguns, extra ammunition, and photographs of two high school girls that they had planned to murder that day. This created quite a stir at the high school that they were headed for.
We rolled at high speed south of Davis, parallel to I-80. I wondered, if we were cruising at our maximum legal speed of 79mph, how fast were some of those cars on I-80 doing, that they passed us so swiftly?
High speed running never seems to last very long on the Union Pacific, and sure enough we were switched into a dead end siding, where we waited for the Capitol that left Sacramento after we did, overtook and passed us. Then we continued to wait for an eastbound Capitol to pass us by. Only then did we slowly back out of the siding and return to the main line to resume our journey.
Lunch is now by reservation only in the dining car, and one staff member made the rounds of the sleepers, then the coaches, to pass our reservation slips. At our 1pm lunch we were seated with a young mother traveling with her 7 yr old girl from Vancouver to LA, where they were going to spend two days at Disneyland, then take a positioning cruise back to Vancouver on the Norwegian Caribbean Line. Their tour operator offered an optional upgrade from a coach airline ticket to First Class on Amtrak for a mere $20.00 per person! Interestingly enough, and coincidentally, they were from the same small town, Hope, British Columbia, as the two ladies that we had breakfast with this morning .
One of the most pleasant features of the Superliner Bedroom (formerly called the Deluxe Bedroom) is the ability to stretch out and take a nap on the sofa, while still allowing your traveling companion the use of a chair and a fold out table to work on. We take advantage of this arrangement, and arrive into San Luis Obispo, today’s destination, refreshed and rested.
San Luis Obispo, California, is Sylvia’s home town, and we are met at the beautifully landscaped and maintained station by old high school friends. Carlos, our car attendant not only brought our luggage down from our room to the station platform, he also carried it over to our friend’s car and loaded into the trunk for us. Needless to say, he received a higher than usual gratuity for this level of service.
We are given a tour of Avila, the funky beach town frequented by San Luis teens in the 1950’s, and now transformed into a trendy and very expensive beach community. This transformation was made possible by a mandated cleanup of decades of oil spills by Union Oil Company, which had a tanker loading dock nearby.
After a steak dinner at Tahoe Joe’s, were dropped off at the Econo Lodge for a night’s rest before departing on our next stage, the 645am departure of the Pacific Surfliner to Los Angeles. The hotel desk clerk promised to arrange a taxi for us for our morning trip to the Amtrak station. I should have been alarmed when his manager, Sanjay Mistry, criticized him for offering this extra service. We will tell you how it worked out in the next episode.
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