THURSDAY 1ST MAY 2025

One would imagine that sleeping to the background noise of a train’s horn and clanging of road gate barriers would be impossible, but that did not bother us at all. That, and the rocking, is part of the joy of train travel. Plus I was running a low temperature so was a bit out of it anyway. The only thing that disturbed me was my increasing cough.

Morning on the Southbound Coast Starlight started with self-service coffee, followed by breakfast in the dining car … then lunch … then dinner. There is no shortage of fresh cooked food on board!

We had seen snow-covered Mt Shasta from the air a few days earlier. Some people write of seeing it from the train on this southbound journey but we did not. I suspect I would have needed to set the alarm for 5am or 6am and we didn’t give that a thought.

In fact we spent all of this day travelling through California including a stop at Martinez where we had been previously to get Lilly and Bob’s marriage licence. Also the train does not go into San Francisco proper (it’s a short bus connection from Emeryville), but we could see it in the distance.

As we gazed out the window the landscape varied between dry brown stretches similar to Australia’s, to green fields under agriculture, to rolling hills such as the area around  the Oakland side of San Francisco.

To be honest, I dozed for a good deal of the trip, but at one stage stirred long enough to go to the observation car to watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean as we continued down the coast. It was scenic of course, but not as dramatic as when we’d driven the Pacific 101 coast road in 2018.

The train was a little behind schedule and we’d be pulling into Los Angeles around 10pm. My mind turned to how we’d get to the hotel. In the process of trying to download a rideshare app to my phone, a clouded head, patchy cell phone reception and a rocking train caused me to hit on a wrong connection. I managed to join a fitness gym for One Dollar. I immediately thought I’d been scammed. I won’t bore you with details of my frantic attempts to cancel the subscription and/or stop my bank allowing any withdrawals on my credit card, but eventually I decided there was nothing I could do until we got to the hotel. I panicked for no reason. Nothing horrible happened and I later found lots of genuine emails in my spam folder, but it just goes to show how off my game I was on that day.

Arriving into Los Angeles railway station for the first time, and late at night, was disorienting. We happily tumbled into the arms of Amtrak’s Red Cap assistance service who drove us to where we could collect our luggage, promising to return to get us out of the station. As time dragged on without his return we ventured out on our own. At that time of night there were many unfortunate people sheltering around, so we didn’t properly appreciate the beauty of the station. More about that in another post.

What we did appreciate was finding a taxi driver quickly. He was of that type who speeds up in order to brake heavily, so we were a bit over him when, after what seemed a long drive on major freeways, we arrived at our hotel, the Andaz Hyatt in West Hollywood. And finally, things brightened up. We were given an upgrade and sent to the 7th floor where a HUGE room with a view awaited us.

A bit wasted on us that first night of course. We were soon enough bed bound.

No photos from this day im sorry…