So I know where I’m going to be and when I’m supposed to be there and for how long. I need a place to sleep. I tried a new tool for some ideas. Google Earth. Incase you don’t know about it you can get it free at www.google.com and click on “more.” Look for “Earth,” click on it and follow the directions to download it. The free version works fine.
With Google Earth you can get a birds eye view of most major areas in the U.S. and many parts of the world. Google Earth also lets you turn on a “layer” that shows the location of hotels. Find the area you are interested in, zoom in, and start looking for hotels. There are no ratings or other information about the hotels on Google Earth but you can click the icon associated with the hotel and go to a web site for that hotel. I found that I could get an idea of what the neighborhood looked like. Did it have an industrial complex across the street or was it in a downtown area. I had the AAA Tourbooks for some of the locations and that listed several possible hotels. I also used the AAA web site. I didn’t use any of the popular web based services (Hotels.com, Expedia.com, etc…) because some of them won’t tell you where the hotel is until you put your money down to complete the booking process. I didn’t want to save $20.00 on a hotel only to spend $25.00 each way on a taxi. Some of the hotels have special rates if you make your reservation on the internet and pay in advance.
After searching and narrowing the possibilities down I started making the reservations. It was rather easy. It only took a few minutes for each hotel. The AAA discounts amounted to between 10% and about 35%.
As I’m writing this, it’s less than two weeks until we depart. I have received my tickets from Amtrak, I have the hotel reservations, and I have an idea of what we are going to do while we’re at most of the stops. Amtrak has been running late on the Sunset Limited and the Coast Starlight most of the dates that I checked. When I say late, I’m not talking 30 minutes or an hour. Some trains have been 14 and 16 hours late. The Sunset Limited is supposed to arrive at 10:10 AM. If it’s two or three hours late we’ll still have most of the day to enjoy LA but if it arrives at 10:10PM, we’ve lost a day. The Coast Starlight has really had problems this summer. It should arrive in Seattle at 8:30PM but if it’s twelve hours late, we’ve bought a hotel room that we won’t be able to use except for taking a shower and freshening up. We will have slept on the train that night. I’ve been tracking its arrival for about a month and the earliest arrival was only three and a half hours late. Amtrak called me about two weeks ago and told me that the departure time from Los Angeles had been move up one hour in an effort to improve the overall performance of the Coast Starlight. The schedule change was effective June 14th but it hasn’t helped much. It might be a few minutes earlier at Emeryville but it is still late by about an hour every day.
Stay tuned for updates.