My previous out-of-town trip on public transportation was to Brooklin, Maine, at the end of a long peninsula about 50 miles from Bangor. My next trip was a little longer.
I hadn’t been all the way across the country on Amtrak since my kids were small and I could take one for half price and the second for free. That was in the 1990s, when I lived in San Diego and owned a car. The routes haven’t changed. I’ve changed. The young father has become a senior citizen, on his way west to visit his adult daughter.
Julian, California is a small town more than four thousand feet up in the mountains east of San Diego. It’s where my kids were babies and attended their first schools. Small towns in California aren’t all that different from small towns in Maine. Julian is as insular and isolated as Brooklin. And, like Brooklin, it’s served by public bus only on Fridays.
To cover the 3,400 miles between my home and my daughter’s, I used a combination of buses and trains, resorting to a car only at the very beginning and end of the trip. It’s a mile, give or take, from my house to the Concord Coach depot on Union Street. A bus leaves from there promptly at 7 AM every day, stops in Augusta and Portland, and arrives at South Station in Boston by 11:30. The train to Chicago leaves at 12:50. The area around the station looked bad and smelled worse. There was a lot of construction going on and no place to buy a newspaper. The news stand in the lobby had been ripped out. I finally found a Boston Globe at a store several blocks away. The train to Chicago left right on time.
All the way across the country, in fact, my trains ran on time. We left Albany more than half an hour late, but made up the time over a rainy night across New York and Ohio and got into Chicago ten minutes early. I got the full four-hour layover between trains, enjoying a leisurely lunch, a walk along Lake Michigan, and another protracted search for a newspaper. I guess people don’t read physical newspapers much anymore. A pity, since on a train a newspaper is much more useful than a computer.
Three days riding in coach is more comfortable at thirty-five than it is at sixty-five, but a train is still ten times better than a bus and twenty times better than a plane. Beds on the train are several times more expensive than coach tickets, and many of the sleeper units don’t have windows. The coach seats are nicely spaced, the trains are usually about half full, there’s a club car and an observation car, and the train makes ample stops for passengers to get out and walk around.
A train allows you to see things you don’t see from the highway: a horse rolling on its back in a yard, the backsides of industrial parks, the extensive wetlands of central Massachusetts, flooding along the mighty Mississippi and its tributaries, the high plains of New Mexico across which Clint Eastwood drifted on horseback with his poncho and guns. There’s a stop in La Plata (rhymes with “See ya latah”), a Missouri town in the middle of nowhere, smaller than either Brooklin or Julian, where nonetheless a dozen passengers disembarked.
We arrived in Los Angeles, as in Chicago, ten minutes ahead of schedule. A recent mudslide had imperiled a section of track near San Clemente, so it was a train to Irvine, a bus to Oceanside, then back on the train to San Diego. (Amtrak comped this part of my trip, which, together with my senior discount, brought the total cost down under $200.) I got off the train in Solana Beach, dipped my feet in the Pacific, then took a local bus to Escondido and another bus up into the hills to Ramona, just twenty-two miles from Julian. My daughter met me there and drove me the rest of the way to her home in the mountains.
The return trip was a red-eye flight to Boston, the T to North Station, the Downeaster train to Portland, and good old Concord Coach back to Bangor.
If you’re thinking about a similar trip, be sure to research the available routes in advance. Leave plenty of wiggle room to make connections. It’s not always evident how to get from one service to another – Amtrak to local bus, for example. I looked up my whole potential itinerary on line before I left Maine. Bring something to read during the inevitable waits. And don’t compare the travel times to driving or flying. You might not get there as fast, but you will arrive in a better state of mind.
