Eric’s Blog

I took the Coast Starlight train 11 to go from Oakland to Santa Barbara on January 16th. I got this ticket for $75. I later realized that because it was Sunday and on MLK weekend, it was more expensive, since the cheapest ticket for this route was $37. I had to wake up early because I had to catch the earliest ccc bus line 6 to go to Orinda BART at 9:30am. Any later than that, I would have missed the train. I stayed up pretty late and pretty much slept only 3 hours because I was watching Kim Possible in Spanish. I also went to buy some toothpaste for Mom and Dad since I was going to take the only tube down South.

The walk from Lake Merritt BART to Amtrak Oakland Jack London was longer than I thought it would be. When I checked it later on Google Map, I realized it was a 0.6 miles walk, which is not so bad, but longer than I expected. I was carrying a bunch of apples that day. When I got to Amtrak, the train was already there. It’s a good thing that the Quik-Trak machines worked pretty well since no attendants were there. I just had to scan the bar-code in and I got my ticket in seconds. I guess Amtrak is suffering from budget cuts, too. I would realize later on this trip that the Amtrak schedule for Coast Starlight is designed with delays built-in, which is why it usually arrives early into a station and has to wait around for awhile before departing. It obviously can’t depart too early, since people rely on the schedule for getting to the station on-time.

The double-decker Superliner

From 20110116-coast-starlight

The train was pretty comfortable. The seats were slightly different than the Pacific Surfliner, but not too different. My car was the one with an Arcade Car on the bottom. They had Raiden Fighters 2 (yay!), Metal Slug 4 (bleh), some cabinet with many boring puzzle games, and Cruisin’ USA (more bleh). Usually, I would be excited about Metal Slug, but Metal Slug 4 was the worst one in the series. The only one that was worse was Metal Slug 1, and that’s only because it’s the first one, so they couldn’t put enough content into it. I blame the Korean developers for Metal Slug 4 for that. Anyways, I played some Raiden Fighters 2, since when I got on, the Metal Slug cabinet’s CRT screen was broken. When I went down later, the Metal Slug screen came on, and I “tried” to play it. “Try” is the keyword here, because initially, I stuck in a quarter to see if it would work. It didn’t. So I went and got some tokens from the machine, since I knew tokens worked for Raiden Fighters 2. They didn’t work, either! I was disappointed and angry, but I figured it was God’s way of telling me I should do work. I spent most of my time on the train doing work, as a matter of fact, and taking short naps in between.

This picture fails to capture how large the train is, but double-deckers are huge!

From 20110116-coast-starlight

Initially, I was seated next to a group of people who seemed to have come from Oregon, and were going to Disneyland. There were kids in this group and they were annoying, but that’s what I signed up for when I decided to take the train. The conductor announced the vistas as we passed by. I didn’t sit on oceanside, so I couldn’t see much, and when I did get a chance to switch to that side, it was too dark to see anything. That’s really too bad, since I haven’t seen the scenery from San Jose to Santa Barbara on a train before.

There were people talking on the train about football. Even the conductor was announcing scores, since it was Sunday. The Jets beat Patriots that day, which was good because the Patriots lost. At the same time, I don’t like the Jets, either.

When I got to Santa Barbara, it was 8:50pm, which is about half an hour late. I was going to buy something to eat on the train, since I only brought 6 slices of bread with me. So between that and breakfast, I didn’t eat enough. The food on the train was pretty expensive, though. It was $1.75 for a bag of chips. I decided not to buy food on the train. Instead, Ellen and I went to Chipotle to get something to eat when I arrived. I forgot how good Chipotle was. Ellen got some Yogurt from Pinkberry’s, which had a really strong yogurt smell in the store for some reason.