Circle Completed
This afternoon I decided to try to book the final leg of the Amtrak Circle Trip to Worldcon, that being the Los Angeles - San Jose run on New Year's Day 2022. As before, the Amtrak web site refused to sell me the trip, insisting that a portion of the trip was unavailable. I once again called Amtrak, and this time when they told me that the wait time was over an hour, signed up for their callback service. After that, I did some calculations and determined that what with the points rebate I got for being an Amtrak credit card holder on the legs of the trips I purchased with points, I had just barely enough points to buy that short trip on points. I therefore called Amtrak Guest Rewards (it's a different number run by different people, apparently), and decided that whichever one answered first, I would take. After a about 1 hour 15 minutes, main Amtrak answered and therefore I bought the tickets with money instead of points.
After I completed that call, I remembered that there was actually a "zeroth leg" of the trip: At the start of the trip, we'll drive to Emeryville, check in to our hotel, and I will drive to San Jose, go to Lisa Deutsch Harrigan's home in San Jose, then have her drop me at San Jose Diridon station, where I'll take a Capitol Corridor train back to Emeryville. That's an unreserved coach train, so I can catch the 3:05, 4:05, 5:05, or 6:05 trains on the same ticket, but it's still worth buying in advance in order to get the 10% Rail Passengers Association discount — assuming I didn't have to sit on the phone for an hour-plus. But this time, for that trip, the Amtrak web site let me actually buy the $17 ticket.
So now we have all of the tickets for the trip: SJC-EMY, EMY-CHI, CHI-WAS (Cardinal), WAS-CHI (Capitol Limited), CHI-NOL, NOL-LAX, and finally LAX-SJC.
All that's left now is making hotel reservations for the layover in Los Angeles and picking out a Holiday Inn Express in the San Jose area where we'll spend the night before driving home on Sunday, January 2.
After I completed that call, I remembered that there was actually a "zeroth leg" of the trip: At the start of the trip, we'll drive to Emeryville, check in to our hotel, and I will drive to San Jose, go to Lisa Deutsch Harrigan's home in San Jose, then have her drop me at San Jose Diridon station, where I'll take a Capitol Corridor train back to Emeryville. That's an unreserved coach train, so I can catch the 3:05, 4:05, 5:05, or 6:05 trains on the same ticket, but it's still worth buying in advance in order to get the 10% Rail Passengers Association discount — assuming I didn't have to sit on the phone for an hour-plus. But this time, for that trip, the Amtrak web site let me actually buy the $17 ticket.
So now we have all of the tickets for the trip: SJC-EMY, EMY-CHI, CHI-WAS (Cardinal), WAS-CHI (Capitol Limited), CHI-NOL, NOL-LAX, and finally LAX-SJC.
All that's left now is making hotel reservations for the layover in Los Angeles and picking out a Holiday Inn Express in the San Jose area where we'll spend the night before driving home on Sunday, January 2.