His idea: a
cross-country trip via train. When I
first heard that, I thought, “Cross-country?
Really? That’s expensive! How in the world….?” My husband sat down at the computer, pulled
up a chair for me, and showed me some of the things that he’d researched. As it turned out, it was relatively
inexpensive (I will give you an actual number before I end this post…so read
on!) considering all of the places we were planning on going…and all of the
things that we would see. Besides that,
choosing to ride the train instead of drive is safer AND allows my husband, who
does most of the driving most of the time, to enjoy the scenery with us and
interact with us.
The planning was not easy.
We had 14 days, and we wanted to see as much of our country as feasibly
possible. We looked at Amtrak for
schedules, deals, and ideas. Finally, we
decided that we would drive to Atlanta (from our home in Myrtle Beach), catch the train there, head south to
Louisiana…we would have a layover for one night in New Orleans (which is where
we boarded the Carnival cruise for our honeymoon, so it was kind of a special
place to us anyway). After New Orleans,
we would head to Texas. I had never been
to Texas before, but my husband had lived there for several years. I had always wanted to visit Texas, so when
this opportunity came up, I jumped at it.
We decided to spend a couple of days in San Antonio. My husband assured me that would be enough
time to see everything that we would want to see there. From San Antonio, we were going to head over
to California! (So, all in all, we would
travel from the East Coast to the West Coast!)
While in California, we decided to see Los Angeles, Hollywood, San
Francisco, Alcatraz Island, and Yosemite national park. It took a long time to narrow it down to all
of this, to plan it out, to check all of the train schedules and work out our
itinerary. I spent several hours in
front of the computer…planning, re-planning…scheduling, then re-scheduling…it
was very frustrating, and very stressful.
Sometimes I would have to call Amtrak to talk to them about what we were
planning, ask them any questions that would arise, etc., etc. My comments on Amtrak Customer Service via
phone are only positive. They were so
nice, so helpful, and so much calmer than I was at the time! One of the last conversations that I had with
them before the actual booking was a long one where a lady walked me through
each segment of our trip, helping me to figure it all out. She spent so much time helping me, and seemed
like she genuinely wanted it all to work out like we were wanting.
We ended up purchasing a U.S. Rail Pass. The rail pass got us 8 segments. As it turned out, we needed 9 segments. So, we had to pay for the rail pass and only
one other segment. It was about $1580
for the entire train trip! That number
really surprises me because to travel that far, I expected the price to be much
more! This was for a family of five,
round trip. If you take that number and
divide it by 5…it was approximately $300 a person! We didn’t have to pay for gas…we didn’t have
wear and tear on our vehicle…and we weren’t going to get lost! To us, the expense was so surprisingly small
from what we were expecting to pay for a cross country train trip.
We had not had a “real” vacation since our honeymoon, so I
was a little rusty on what I should pack…what will we need….what should we take
with us on the train to eat as we travel.
There would be no stopping at fast food restaurants to get burgers and
fries! We saw that there was food available on the train…for
a price… As we looked at the menus
online, we found that this was not going to be the way for us to eat. It was too expensive, for a family of five,
for sure. We decided that we should
carry things with us to eat along the way.
Next in the series of our vacation posts, I will go into more detail about what we took with us to help
keep our vacation within our budget!
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