Hopping on the Coast Starlight

We did something totally out of character yesterday: we rode the Amtrak train for 11 hours up the coast of California.

It all started when a band of people from 43Things invited us to join them. It became apparent later on that most of them would ride from Emeryville on up to Seattle, but we decided to ride the train from a little north of L.A. (Van Nuys) up to Emeryville. I had never been on a train in the United States, so this was my first one.

We flew down early Saturday morning to Burbank, took a cab ride (directions in Russian from another cab driver - much appreciated) to Van Nuys Amtrak Station, and then hopped aboard. The conductor had already warned us that the train was pretty full, and he wasn't kidding. We felt lucky to get two seats together...

but had no more than sat down, noticed that our window wasn't easy to see through due to the heavy curtains, saw the people ahead of us switch seats, and asked the conductor if we could also switch. No problem!

We spent the day gazing at the lovely scenery outside the east window, going over to the lounge car and grabbing whatever seat was available and watching through the west window, and then making reservations and having two meals in the dining car.

The kids almost outnumbered the adults on the train, and it appeared that the parents would just turn them all loose -- an enclosed, moving babysitter -- so we had to hop over them all journey long. At least they weren't in the dining car, our one refuge from them; they feasted on hog dogs and pizza, and we had a couple of nice, quiet meals.

Since the tables are few, you must stick closely to your reservation time, and we found ourselves sitting side-by-side as we got the luck of the draw in dining companions. Our first couple, during lunch, were very young, cats but no kids yet, going back to Martinez from visiting parents in San Diego. They were very pleasant, but she seemed really antsy about eating backwards: while the train lurched forward, so did her stomach.


The couple for dinner was older than we were. They started from their home in Albuquerque, and were on their way to Seattle to visit their daughter. They talked about two idyllic visits to see her in Hawaii, while her Army husband was stationed there, and Roy and I exchanged memories of Scofield Barracks on Oahu. I remembered visiting Dan there in 1977.

We had the same waitress both times, and she was a hoot. She noticed our 43Things name plates and told us she is currently hosting a fisherman's online discussion group on religious and philosophical subjects. She started long ago, before the internet was the internet, on AOL. It all sounded very familiar. We explained what 43Things was to her and our dining companions, but as it turned out, we didn't find any of them on the train.

We had an hour-long stop near San Jose, due to a brush fire up ahead. Something like that would be a miserable delay on a bus or plane but was very pleasant on a train. All the bathrooms are downstairs, we discovered, and all the goodies were upstairs.

When we got off the train, totally exhausted from over 12 hours of traveling, we ran into Mahinui from 43Things, who, with her husband, Robert, was getting ON the train. We had a quick, oh my! a hug, and went separate ways.

This is just a dry run for our big train rides to and from Chicago through the Colorado Rockies. Our sleep-in car will have its own bathroom. I can't wait for October.