Joy of a train ride with kids in the US
Travel from LA to Seattle by rail aboard the Coast Starlight. Laura Randall shares her experiences
WE WERE nearly 480km into our 2 250km trip on Amtrak’s Coast Starlight when it dawned on me to check on the kids. I veered down the aisles of two passenger coaches to the observation coach, where my 9-year-old and 13-year-old sons had secured a table and layered it with books, tablets and enough snacks to satisfy a Pacific Crest Trail through-hiker.
But their eyes, like those of almost everyone else lucky to snag a seat in the glass-ceilinged coach, were trained on the views that mark the stretch between Santa Barbara and Salinas, California – rolling hills blanketed in yellow and orange wildflowers, windswept sand dunes, linear fields of lettuce and strawberries.
Even the fogged-in coast that day didn’t deter from the novelty of the experience, and passengers swivelled in their chairs or walked freely around the coach to get just the right camera shot before it disappeared in a blur.
Last spring, my family and I took the coach version of what is widely considered to be America’s most beautiful train ride. We paid about $600 (R8 078) for the four of us to travel from Los Angeles to Seattle and back.
In the days leading up to our departure, I worried that we should have paid the extra money for a private sleeper unit (and the white-tablecloth meals that come with it), because we would end up spending our four-day layover in Seattle sleeping and recuperating, instead of enjoying the city.
In the end, though, there were few regrets. Our reclining seats were wide and roomy and easy access to the observation coach and snack bar gave us an unexpected freedom to spread out and separate when familial wars of attrition set in.
By the time we disembarked 36 hours later, we were dishevelled and a bit achy, but revelling in the extraordinary views we had just witnessed and feeling impressed with the cross-section of people who use train travel as a practical, social way to get from one destination to another.
The train’s departure from Union Station in Los Angeles on a sunny Friday at 10.10am sharp was inauspicious enough. The hurried mind-set of urban life vanished, as we kept pace with cars travelling on the freeway and rolled past backyard trampolines and clotheslines.
We learnt about train etiquette in the first hour. For instance, it’s routine and almost expected to ask strangers where they are headed and why they picked this particular route.
The retired man behind us, a veteran rail traveller, was on his way home to Bellingham, Washington, after taking the Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles.
A grandmother from Los Angeles was bound for southern Oregon to see her daughter and grandkids, grumbling cheerfully that she was going to insist they all come to her next time. A college student with a duffel bag that almost filled an entire overhead compartment was heading home to Sacramento for the spring break.
We also learnt that dining-car reservations are taken seriously. In a voice reminiscent of a preschool teacher, an attendant announced soon after we left LA that staff would be moving through the cars taking lunch and dinner reservations.
Then she repeated the whole process, twice. There was a waiting list by the time staff reached us, making us glad we had opted to take advantage of the limitless luggage policy and pack a cooler full of sandwiches, cheese, nuts, wine and chocolates. Most of our seat-mates ended up with microwaved pizza and burgers from the snack bar.
We picked up other spoken and unspoken rules as we rolled along: you may only get off the train to stretch or smoke at designated stops such as Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo. Don’t wander around shoeless or you may be ordered back to your seat like a duncecapped student. Quiet times, at least in our experience, were respected for the most part; even midnight stops seemed deliberately subdued.
Just when restlessness began to take hold after 20 hours and the passenger coaches started to smell faintly like a yoga studio, along came Mount Shasta. Waking up to the sight of the snowcapped mountain, California’s fifth-largest peak, as we neared the Oregon border was a highlight of the trip. The views had transformed overnight from coastal plains and farmland to pine forest and rock glaciers.
The panoramas got even better after a brief stop in Klamath Falls, Oregon. We enjoyed our snack-bar coffee, hot chocolate and doughnuts while staring at the shimmering rim of Upper Klamath Lake, then winding through remote snow-covered forests in the Cascade Mountains just north of Crater Lake National Park.
It re-energised us for the remaining eight hours to Seattle, along with the festive, almost-there vibe among the standing-room-only crowd in the observation coach.
After four days of sightseeing in Seattle, the children were less excited about the train ride back to Los Angeles. But we arrived at King Street Station on the morning of departure rested and wielding more confidence about what to expect. –