It's 2006 and I've talked Frances into going on a train trip this year. It started out as maybe an eight day trip with stops in two cities but it grew a bit larger. It turns out to be a real bargan at.... You can probably guess. Click below to read the rest of this entry.
It’s now 2006 and I’m ready for another “adventure.” I might be ready but Frances isn’t all that keen on taking a train trip. I often say she should have been named “Dorothy”, like the girl in “The Wizard of Oz.” She has often said as we neared the end of a vacation “There’s no place like home.” I new I had a job before me if we were going to take a trip this year.
A trip to the computer and www.amtrak.com and the little wheels in my head were turning. Let’s see. If I drive to Chicago again I could take the Southwest Chief to Los Angeles and back. I wonder how much would that be? I punched in the destinations and some dates and it came back with a basic fare of a little over four hundred dollars per person. OK. What if I added Emeryville in the mix and came back to Chicago on the California Zephyr? This time it was $441.00. What if I left from Cincinnati? We had thought about that for last year but it cost more and the timing wasn’t convenient. So how much for Cincinnati to Chicago, to Los Angles, to Emeryville, back to Chicago, and finally Cincinnati? I was surprised to see $441.00 again. This was looking pretty good to me. I checked some other options and found that I could start in Cincinnati and go just about anywhere out west and if I picked the most direct routes I could travel for $441.00. Then I got to thinking about how I could maximize my travel for the bucks. How about Cincinnati to New Orleans (via Chicago), then Los Angeles via the Sunset Limited, up to Seattle, and then back to Chicago and Cincinnati. Anything we looked at last year with the Sunset Limited ran our cost us quite a bit. So how much would this route cost? You guessed it, $441.00 per person. I got a little more specific and punched in our discounts. Frances can use the 10% AAA discount and I get 15% Veterans Advantage discount. With those discounts the rail fare for the two of us would be $771.75. Boy! I could see a whopper of a trip for our summer vacation but I still had to convince Dorothy, or make that Frances. I also knew that if we went on a trip like that we would have to stop at a few places to go “shopping.”
For the next month or two I kept dropping little hints. “Where you want to go for vacation this year?” “How would you like to go to California?” “We had such a great trip last year, you’d love it. Just sit back and enjoy the ride and the scenery as it goes by or you can sleep while we travel.” Even before that last line, she new I was really pushing for a train trip. Finally, she sort of indicated that she might be willing to do a trip like that.
“I’ll go one time but don’t expect me to do it again.” She said.
All right! I got the go ahead. She said we could do it! I better do this one right if I ever want a chance to get her to go again next year.
For the next few weeks I did some investigating. What kind of connections could we make? I didn’t want to have to transfer from train to bus in route. As a matter of fact, I didn’t want to take the bus anywhere. Amtrak has several “Thruway” bus connections as part of their service between some stations. I downloaded the current timetables for the Sunset Limited, The Southwest Chief, The California Zephyr, and The Empire Builder from the Amtrak web site. Except for the Sunset Limited, all of these train run between Chicago and the west coast. The Sunset Limited runs between New Orleans and Los Angeles (normally it runs to Orlando Florida but has been temporarily terminated in New Orleans until infrastructure that was damaged in the 2005 hurricanes can be restored.)
The Amtrak website only allows a multi-city trip with four segments. Cincinnati to New Orleans is one segment even though it involves two trains. I wanted to do a five segment trip. Could I go Cincinnati to New Orleans, then Los Angeles, Emeryville, Seattle, and back to Cincinnati for the same of slightly more? I went by the AAA office and ask one of their planners. She called Amtrak with my proposed itinerary and requested for a price quote. If you didn’t guess, the price with the extra stop was still $771.75.