Worldcon Travel Booking
As I was scouting potential travel dates for our planned train travel to Chicon 8 later this year, I discovered to my annoyance that what Lisa and I had penciled in as our return date (Thursday, September 8) is already sold out of bedrooms. There are ten bedrooms (two sleepers, five bedrooms per car) on the California Zephyr, so it was surprising to find them all gone already. Thus, we concluded that we were going to have to go ahead an make our bookings already, and leave a day later than originally planned.
[A separate bother about manually crossposting DW entries to LJ is that the cut tag in DW is just "cut" but is "lj-cut" on LiveJournal. The DW-to-LJ cross-poster translates that, but when you are just cutting and pasting, you have to change it manually. I may stop putting stuff behind cut tags in LJ.]
Experience has shown us that doing almost anything other than a basic booking with nothing complicated at all about it on the Amtrak website is a waste of time. This booking wasn't simple. One direction is paid for, both passengers with Rail Passengers Association discounts, plus a companion-travels-free coupon, plus a $200 Amtrak travel voucher given to us in partial compensation for the trouble they caused us when our New Orleans-Los Angeles sleeper was cancelled. The return was on Amtrak Guest Rewards (AGR) points, and you can't book a paid and points trip on the same reservation anyway. So it was off to the telephone.
The AGR phone line is only open from 8 AM Eastern, so I was up at 5 AM to get in the queue as soon as I could. To use my points, I need to call the AGR line, not the regular Amtrak line. Fortunately, the AGR agents can also process paid trips. After about a 15 minute wait, I got an agent who was able to process all of the complex pieces of this trip both directions. Using points outbound from Reno to Chicago was relatively straightforward. For the return, the combination of RPA discounts, companion coupon, and voucher brought the price down from $2441 to $2039.
I got my reservations in email, thanked the agent, and hung up. Then I realized that I'd made one mistake once I looked at the bedroom assignments. Amtrak Superliner bedrooms are labeled A through E. A is closest to the connection to the next car and is the least desirable room because it's slightly smaller and oddly shaped because it has to accommodate where the corridor swings back over to connect to the next car. E is considered the nicest because it's the farthest away from the train wheels (bogies or trucks, depending on English or American jargon). However, we also know that the rooms are not identically arranged, and the one usable power outlet in the room varies in placement, and that rooms B and D are better for us. Rooms B-C and D-E are pairs, with a potential connecting door. (Our attendant on the way to Chicago last time told me the late John Madden, before he bought the Madden Cruiser, would travel on a pair of connecting bedrooms.) Our reservations were for bedroom C, both directions.
So it was back to the phones and another ten-minute wait. Because the normal booking algorithm books from E to A, our ideal room D wasn't available, but we got room B, which means a much shorter extension cord run for our stuff on the trip.
The only thing we haven't confirmed is whether the parking garage we identified near the Reno Amtrak station actually will work for long-term parking the way it seems to be able to work from what we found online. If so, it's a bargain at $5/day. Even if it does not work, the worst-cast scenario seems to be to drive to the station long before our scheduled 4 PM departure on August 28, leave the luggage with Lisa the station, then have me drive to Reno Airport and park there for $10/day and take a taxi back downtown, and that's still not too bad. There will also be the challenge of stowing our luggage (including the "Elephant," i.e. the big camera case) in the lower level luggage rack. Lisa very much does not want to trust that camera to checked luggage, but because we won't be starting in Emeryville, the origin station, there's a good chance that the racks will be crowded by the time we board in Reno.
[A separate bother about manually crossposting DW entries to LJ is that the cut tag in DW is just "cut" but is "lj-cut" on LiveJournal. The DW-to-LJ cross-poster translates that, but when you are just cutting and pasting, you have to change it manually. I may stop putting stuff behind cut tags in LJ.]
Experience has shown us that doing almost anything other than a basic booking with nothing complicated at all about it on the Amtrak website is a waste of time. This booking wasn't simple. One direction is paid for, both passengers with Rail Passengers Association discounts, plus a companion-travels-free coupon, plus a $200 Amtrak travel voucher given to us in partial compensation for the trouble they caused us when our New Orleans-Los Angeles sleeper was cancelled. The return was on Amtrak Guest Rewards (AGR) points, and you can't book a paid and points trip on the same reservation anyway. So it was off to the telephone.
The AGR phone line is only open from 8 AM Eastern, so I was up at 5 AM to get in the queue as soon as I could. To use my points, I need to call the AGR line, not the regular Amtrak line. Fortunately, the AGR agents can also process paid trips. After about a 15 minute wait, I got an agent who was able to process all of the complex pieces of this trip both directions. Using points outbound from Reno to Chicago was relatively straightforward. For the return, the combination of RPA discounts, companion coupon, and voucher brought the price down from $2441 to $2039.
I got my reservations in email, thanked the agent, and hung up. Then I realized that I'd made one mistake once I looked at the bedroom assignments. Amtrak Superliner bedrooms are labeled A through E. A is closest to the connection to the next car and is the least desirable room because it's slightly smaller and oddly shaped because it has to accommodate where the corridor swings back over to connect to the next car. E is considered the nicest because it's the farthest away from the train wheels (bogies or trucks, depending on English or American jargon). However, we also know that the rooms are not identically arranged, and the one usable power outlet in the room varies in placement, and that rooms B and D are better for us. Rooms B-C and D-E are pairs, with a potential connecting door. (Our attendant on the way to Chicago last time told me the late John Madden, before he bought the Madden Cruiser, would travel on a pair of connecting bedrooms.) Our reservations were for bedroom C, both directions.
So it was back to the phones and another ten-minute wait. Because the normal booking algorithm books from E to A, our ideal room D wasn't available, but we got room B, which means a much shorter extension cord run for our stuff on the trip.
The only thing we haven't confirmed is whether the parking garage we identified near the Reno Amtrak station actually will work for long-term parking the way it seems to be able to work from what we found online. If so, it's a bargain at $5/day. Even if it does not work, the worst-cast scenario seems to be to drive to the station long before our scheduled 4 PM departure on August 28, leave the luggage with Lisa the station, then have me drive to Reno Airport and park there for $10/day and take a taxi back downtown, and that's still not too bad. There will also be the challenge of stowing our luggage (including the "Elephant," i.e. the big camera case) in the lower level luggage rack. Lisa very much does not want to trust that camera to checked luggage, but because we won't be starting in Emeryville, the origin station, there's a good chance that the racks will be crowded by the time we board in Reno.