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TrainCon Scramble
Jul. 26th, 2021 05:18 pmThe smoke conditions were mostly unchanged today.
( The Daily Gloom )
The "TrainCon" group ticket purchase fell through — too few people committed to the trip — so the organizer had to call it off. He refunded our money right away, and dropped the reservations earlier today, which put them back into the Amtrak general reservation pool. That meant that I had to rush to go ahead and book the bedroom on the Cardinal that I'd reserved as part of the original TrainCon. On the bright side, thanks to the way Amtrak's fare buckets work, it actually saved us $167 to book a bedroom on our own than as part of the group purchase. On the downside, I was unable to actually purchase the ticket on the Amtrak website, either on Firefox or Chrome. I would get as far as making the purchase and the site would respond that "a portion of your journey is no longer available." That's a message I kept getting while trying to book trips on points.
After several fruitless attempts to book online, I got in the queue for an Amtrak agent. If it had been earlier in the day, I might have tried driving to Reno to buy a ticket from the station agent. After only about a 30 minute wait (it can apparently be much longer), I reached a nice fellow who sorted everything else and booked that trip.
This means all of the legs of the trip are now booked except the last one: Los Angeles to San Jose, where Lisa Deutsch Harrigan will collect us. (She's agreed to let me leave my van with her while we're gone for the multi-week-long trip around the USA.) After discussing it with her and considering how poor Amtrak's on-time performance has been (we can't trust the five-hour connection time as Los Angeles), we'll lay over in LA for one day (New Year's Eve, as it happens), and take the Coast Starlight to San Jose the next morning, arriving (we hope) sometime around 8:30 PM that evening, spending the night at a hotel somewhere in the San Jose area, and driving home the next day.
Looking at the booking up the coast, we find that the cost of a roomette is only $150 more than the two coach seats. That seems like a bargain (especially because you don't have to mask up inside your room when the door is closed; this of course assumes that masks are still mandatory, which may well be the case), so I tried to book it this evening. Surprise! The website once again refused to let me actually book the trip. I didn't have the stomach for waiting for an agent again, so maybe I will try tomorrow and hope that the cheap compartment is still available tomorrow.
I understand that some of the other people who would be traveling by TrainCon will still take the train, just not as part of the group purchase, so, like our travel to Worldcon 75 via the Ferry from Germany, the convention will get an early start as we meet up with other fans, including, I think, at least one other member of the WSFS Business Meeting staff, assuming all goes as planned.
( The Daily Gloom )
The "TrainCon" group ticket purchase fell through — too few people committed to the trip — so the organizer had to call it off. He refunded our money right away, and dropped the reservations earlier today, which put them back into the Amtrak general reservation pool. That meant that I had to rush to go ahead and book the bedroom on the Cardinal that I'd reserved as part of the original TrainCon. On the bright side, thanks to the way Amtrak's fare buckets work, it actually saved us $167 to book a bedroom on our own than as part of the group purchase. On the downside, I was unable to actually purchase the ticket on the Amtrak website, either on Firefox or Chrome. I would get as far as making the purchase and the site would respond that "a portion of your journey is no longer available." That's a message I kept getting while trying to book trips on points.
After several fruitless attempts to book online, I got in the queue for an Amtrak agent. If it had been earlier in the day, I might have tried driving to Reno to buy a ticket from the station agent. After only about a 30 minute wait (it can apparently be much longer), I reached a nice fellow who sorted everything else and booked that trip.
This means all of the legs of the trip are now booked except the last one: Los Angeles to San Jose, where Lisa Deutsch Harrigan will collect us. (She's agreed to let me leave my van with her while we're gone for the multi-week-long trip around the USA.) After discussing it with her and considering how poor Amtrak's on-time performance has been (we can't trust the five-hour connection time as Los Angeles), we'll lay over in LA for one day (New Year's Eve, as it happens), and take the Coast Starlight to San Jose the next morning, arriving (we hope) sometime around 8:30 PM that evening, spending the night at a hotel somewhere in the San Jose area, and driving home the next day.
Looking at the booking up the coast, we find that the cost of a roomette is only $150 more than the two coach seats. That seems like a bargain (especially because you don't have to mask up inside your room when the door is closed; this of course assumes that masks are still mandatory, which may well be the case), so I tried to book it this evening. Surprise! The website once again refused to let me actually book the trip. I didn't have the stomach for waiting for an agent again, so maybe I will try tomorrow and hope that the cheap compartment is still available tomorrow.
I understand that some of the other people who would be traveling by TrainCon will still take the train, just not as part of the group purchase, so, like our travel to Worldcon 75 via the Ferry from Germany, the convention will get an early start as we meet up with other fans, including, I think, at least one other member of the WSFS Business Meeting staff, assuming all goes as planned.
