The Coast Starlight, our train to Los Angeles, where we are scheduled to board the Southwest Chief tomorrow to go to Albuquerque, is still running.  (This is an overnight train from Seattle, but since it left yesterday, it will get in on Wednesday, and even if it's very late, there is no possibility that it will be caught in the strike deadline of midnight Friday.)  We boarded in Emeryville. At that point, the train was running about an hour and a half late.  We're due in to LA at about 9 p.m., so an hour and a half late would be tiresome.  The status report on the train was predicting that we would arrive 45 minutes early, however, which seemed very unlikely, but in the event, we did arrive about 10 minutes early.  Made up all that time somewhere.

This train did have the observation car and, therefore, the cafe car.  (I had bought a few snacks at the hotel just in case, but didn't need them.  We got to eat very average train food.  I had a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and a hot dog for dinner.  Food not great, but edible and way better than nothing!)  The Coast Starlight through California is known for the ocean views down in Southern California, from about Santa Barbara onward.   This time, we were on the correct side of the train for the views, and we spent a few minutes in the observation car, so I ended up with some nice photos.  

As we rolled through Northern California, getting our last views of the California hills (the ones I call golden and Tim calls brown), I was pondering the sort of atavistic reaction I have been having to seeing them again.  It's not nostalgia or any sort of feeling of homecoming (I wouldn't move back to the Bay Area if we could afford it, which we cannot.  We'd have to live in a mailbox.  There are just way too many people and way too much traffic.  And the homeless problem is widespread and intractable.  And things cost WAY more than they do where we live.)  I finally decided that the feeling of comfort I was deriving from the scenery was the fact that it recalls a past when my knowledge of how little progress we've made in terms of achieving real progress against bigotry and injustice and when I had a much better opinion of human nature.  I don't desire to go back to ignorance, but it was a lot easier when I had that more naive world view.   The hills were functioning, I think, as a window into that easier past.

Once we were on the train, we talked to the conductor about the likelihood that the Southwest Chief would run tomorrow, and he said it would take a miracle and that if we had Plan B, we should get on it.  So we decided to commit to our  Plan B, which was very much less than desireable, but which will at least get us to Los Alamos on Friday in time to catch up with our planned itinerary.  We paid for a rental car and made a hotel reservation in Gallup, Arizona, about 3/4 of the way to Los Alamos.  The next problem we encountered was that the reasonably priced rental cars (for 10 days and drop off in New Mexico) that we checked last night, which were available then at the Amtrak station in LA, were gone.  We could get a car, but it was going to cost about $1800.  We decided to rent from the airport, because we could get a car for half that.  The really tiresome part of that is that we will have to go to the airport tomorrow morning, a trip we expect to take about an hour and a half in a Lyft.   No matter where we get the rental car, we will have to drive from there out of Los Angeles during rush hour on a week day, so that's going to be REALLY really tiresome.

No sooner than we paid for the car and committed to the hotel, than the Southwest Chief for tomorrow was canceled, so at least we beat some of the rush to plans B.

The hotel, though, is El Rancho Hotel, and it's one that we wanted to stay in while on our Route 66 trip four years ago, but we couldn't make the logistics work.  You can see the photos I took at the time here.

We rolled in to LA about 9 p.m. and went to the hotel, which was about a 5-minute walk away.  It's the only hotel in the area of Amtrak, which is pretty strange in itself, and it's not what you would call a high-class joint.  The room and bathroom were clean and the bed was comfortable, but the hallways are dingy and the carpet out there is dirty.  I know a lot of people who would refuse to stay there, but it was good enough for our purposes, and, had we been leaving from the train station again tomorrow, would have been ideal.