The Coast Starlight from Santa Barbara to Oakland

Sorry about this. I write the text first and then look for the appropriate picture, but the latter don't seem to want to move where I want them. I guess I need to upload the picture first and then the text. So you are reading and looking at this entry backwards, as if that information made any difference at all.

After we left San Luis Obispo (though it sounds as if the natives leave off the last word) we headed inland after climbing slowly through some switchbacks with tunnels and nice scenery. Before and after that we saw some industrial strength farming, with plantings of all kinds of vegetables and some fruits, none of which we could recognize from the train. No grapes that I could see, though the Central Coast is supposed to have lots of vineyards, 140 of them in Santa Barbara County alone. We saw some cows along the way; they looked reasonably contented from a distance, though I would not call them "happy cows." Maybe they are kept some place else.

After leaving Paso Robles we saw some nice looking vineyards and a lot of rough country. This part of the state looks a lot grittier than Santa Barbara. According to the map it looks like the Central Coast extends from about 60 miles north of Los Angeles, around Oxnard and Simi Valley all the way up to about 60 miles south of San Francisco, near Santa Cruz.

The station in Santa Barbara was built in 1905 according to the date high up on its trackside facade. A fair number of people got on, mostly students and old folks like us or maybe even older. Right on time we edge out of town, staying close to the ocean for the most part all the way to San Luis Obispo. The green line below is Hwy 101, the train route is the blue line. It is about 330 miles to San Francisco, which takes us between eight and nine hours, which I think averages out to less than 40 miles per hour. Surely we can do better than that, can't we? Can't we just all get along? Oh sorry, that last is from a different story.



Finished looking up my friends at the GI Path course in Santa Barbara early on Friday, 6 June 2008, the 64th anniversary of the Normandy landings by American, British and Canadian forces. I didn’t see any mention of it in the SB paper this morning.

For not very clear reasons we got seats on the right side of the train. The ocean, of course, is on the left. My bride of nearly 46 years is reading and snoozing in the comfortable seat next to me. We just finished a very nice lunch with some good wine and Haagen Daz ice cream, though the attendant must have thought we were sleeping car people as she only charged us for the drinks. I thought I would straighten things out when we went back for dinner but Carol beat me to the punch by several hours. As a consequence when the main dining car guy came around taking reservations for dinner he had nothing but good words for us, and gave us a choice time even though we were in coach. We may even get a free drink out of it.

Arrived in Oakland only 5-10 minutes late, and whisked away quickly to the safe environs of Marin County by our tall blonde patient son-in-law Don.