I hate going to L.A. in one day, and yet I'm burnt out on doing the San Juaqin route and then spending the night in boring Bakersfield. But being mentally ill, I cannot get up in the mornings in time to take the Coast Starlight to L.A. So then what to insomniac train buffs do? Well, I could take Greyhound, except that Greyhound sucks, and so I only do it as a last resort. The people on there are scary, well, no scarier than me; but you know how that goes, even scary people don't want to see each other and are hoping to be among non-scary people. Plus then I hate Green Tortoise to L.A., because the bus has no bathroom. True they stop every four hours, but some of us old guys with bad bladders cannot wait four hours. True they'll stop the bus for people who need to go, but then one is publically having to annoy everyone because one can't hold one's pee, so then what?

Here's a neat one: If you live in SF, you take Cal-Train to San Jose, thus bypassing all that silly Emeryville transfer point, where you take a bus to the East Bay only to get on a train and take it back to the same side of the bridge you came from when you arrive in San Jose. Anyway, you get off at San Jose and then catch an Amtrak bus that does a six-hour night run to San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara. One spends the night at either point, thus having a nice little evening on the Amtrak bus, at San Luis Obispo if you just got a couple hundred from relatives in Christmas money, and, if one just got a total yuppie job but just hates cars, then one can go all the way in to Santa Barbara and pay $300 per night.

Then, the next day, from most of the central coast joints starting from Paso Robles on down, and a lot of folks, including myself didn't really get this, there are commuter trains called Pacific Surfliners that go all the way, in some cases from Paso Robles to San Diego for a very modest price, and they don't smell like the Starlight and other three-day trip trains do; (Since most multi-day trains only have showers that are practical for the sleeper car class. One could manage a shower from coach, but it's not pretty. So then the Surfliners have the advantage of getting one from just South of the Bay Area all the way practically to Mexico one a single, breezy day-train with great scenery the whole way.