Sleeper Car Fun! I got two meals, free champagne, free wine,
and a private place to get away from everyone if I needed to, which I only sat in after dinner.
The train was two hours late to the station, which was OK by me, but most of the travelers were very upset. The luggage check lady had an argument with a man who checked his luggage (which is free), then went to lunch, and then came back to uncheck his luggage. The woman was upset because they have a "luggage watching" service for $4. So she yelled at him, saying he was just trying to game the system, and that wasn't how it was supposed to be, and now they had to go through and find all of his luggage. He was taken aback (I'm pretty sure he wasn't trying to game the system, but maybe he was a good actor) and was apologizing as she went and got her luggage. Another guy, grandpa aged, kept standing impatiently next to the check in table, cutting up close to people checking in their luggage, and asking the lady when the train was coming, and what the problem was, and so on (I found out later that they needed to switch out a sleeper car due to a blown out AC unit). I wasn't even really paying attention to the guy and he was getting on my nerves. I could only imagine what the actual Amtrak employee was feeling.
Since I sat outside for about 2 hours, I got to watch a homeless guy make loops and ask for quarters. He probably went around four or five times, asking different people each time.
Our conductor came over the intercom, saying, “Now
Arriving: Salinas. Wohoo!” very much like Art would. The train has been having
some issues, and earlier he came on and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, some
approximate times for you here,” at the end of which he said “Well, at the rate
we’re going, it could be one, three, four, five, heck, we might not even get
there.” They’ve been running behind all day, and stuff just keeps getting
worse. We just had to switch something over because the electric hasn’t been
working.
I saw Florence in the waiting room at Amtrak. I couldn't
bring myself to go and sit next to her. She was nice to listen to the first time around, but it was going to be exhausting the second. I was enjoying being in my own little world, and having to talk to another person was going to suck.
That being said, I sat with all sorts of people on the train. For lunch, I was with two guys traveling from Albuquerque to San Francisco. They took the overnighter to LA and then transferred to this train. The one told me how he used to bike the three hundred miles down to Santa Barbara and then take the train back up on Thanksgiving weekend--a hundred miles a day. At the wine tasting, I sat with an engineer who has been all over the US and Europe. We were having a lot of fun; when the guy came to get dinner reservations, he thought we were together and was really embarrassed when we told him we had just met. We both ended up being seated together for dinner too, along with a couple on their first anniversary. She works for Boeing and he is a paramedic from the OC. We also had a good dinner and talked about high school and traveling; they had to ask us to leave because they needed the table.
This is my last "travel" train experience. Tomorrow is the Wine Train in Napa, the other thing I am most looking forward to. One thing that everyone I have talked to has said is that the train is such a nice way to travel. It's comfortable, it's a slower pace. You don't have to worry about cars and parking. I've gotten to meet so many more people on the train than I ever do when I fly. It's nice!
I think I'm at San Jose!
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