Huge number of photos for this post.
Dave met me at the train station and we headed over to Berkeley and got Kate. There we had sushi and walked around downtown Berkeley and the college campus. I saw some eucalyptus trees that rivaled the redwoods in height and girth.
The next morning, we headed into San Francisco on the BART. It was a gray and drizzly day.
The first thing I saw when I exited the Embarcadero BART station.
I didn’t take many photos on the second day of the Zephyr ride.
We stopped early in Reno, Nevada, where I got off the train and walked a little bit. There wasn’t a lot of time. There was one health conscious family that jogged up and down the length of the train to get exercise. There wasn’t much to see at the Reno station.
From Reno we headed up into the Sierra’s of California. It’s similar to Colorado, but it seemed like the main view out of either side of the train was trees. There were some exceptions.
Truckee, California from the Dining Car. Did I mention that all meals are included with a sleeper car?
As previously mentioned, I’ve wanted to take the California Zephyr to California for decades. I finally did it. It turned into an even larger excursion to make a loop, including three other train routes: The Coast Starlight, The Pacific Surfliner, and The Southwest Chief. (You can visit Amtrak’s web page for each route by clicking on the links.)
Here is a quick synopsis of the trip. I left Denver on the Zephyr to Emeryville, California where I stayed with friends for a few days of sight seeing. I departed on the Coast Starlight from Emeryville to Los Angeles, where I changed trains and continued my journey on the Pacific Surfliner to the San Diego area. I stayed with family for about 5 days. I took the train back up to L.A. and transferred to the Southwest Chief that would take me back east along a more southern route to Raton, New Mexico. From there, I took a dedicated Amtrak bus north to Denver — a complete loop.
The California Zephyr departs lower downtown Denver.
I’ve got a bunch of photos, but in a lot of cases, the quality is not very good due to reflections off the window, or the window tinting interfering with the color, etc. Click on the photos for a larger view.
