Having made it to King City by bicycle, I realized that I really didn’t have it in me - both time-wise and desire-wise - to get much further. I could have ridden to Paso Robles or such, another 50 miles, but I decided it might be fun to take Amtrak. I had planned all along to take Amtrak, but the plan had been to do it from San Luis Obispo. But I knew there was an Amtrak bus connecting service in King City, so I thought I would give that a try.
The first fail came with trying to just book the trip. Because I had a bicycle, I needed a special bike reservation on the train portion from SLO to San Juan Capistrano. Some trains already were full for bicycles because of the World Cup, so I definitely couldn’t just “show up and hope”. But the problem is that I needed a combination bus connection and train trip, and the computer system believed, in its little heart, that I could not get my bike on the connecting bus, and because of that, it wouldn’t let me book a bike on any of the trip. Even after calling and talking to an Amtrak employee, we just could not solve that problem. There was, of course, no problem with putting my bike on the bus, as another Amtrak employee would confirm for me in person, but…no dice.
So plan B was to take county/city buses. I’d learned about this plan from a YouTuber whose video I watched where he went all the way from Oakland to LA just using local public transit. So I rode over to the King City bus stop and got on Route 84 of Monterey-Salinas Transit, just a local bus for $2 that took me all the way to Paso Robles. What a treat! Beautiful views, cheap ride, great service, on time. I had lunch in Paso Robles - very nice place, beautiful book store, great restaurant that Jen recommended - and then hopped on Route 9 on SLO transit down to San Luis Obispo. I considered - and, in hindsight, perhaps should have - just continuing to take local buses, but instead I went to the Amtrak terminal in SLO, where me and my bike had a ticket on the Pacific Surfliner.
I really, really wanted to like Amtrak. There were a number of Europeans on the train, a bunch of Swiss people here to watch the cup, and I wanted them - and me - to have a good experience. We did not. The conductor was very rude, the employees were super confused, but most importantly, the train arrived over 3 hours late into LA, and would not take us any further; we were asked to transfer to a bus to San Juan Capistrano. It took, in total, about 11 hours for me to get from SLO to SJC, a trip that would take, by car, about 3 and a half or 4 hours even with traffic, maybe all of 200 miles or so. There was a broken train on the tracks for a while, then we had to rescue it, then our own locomotive went bad - it was a nightmare. And all along the way, nobody had any idea what was happening.
Because I got into SJC so late, there were no Ubers or anything, and even though it was only 7 miles to the AirBnb, it took over an hour. I was so tired that I kept mismanaging my gear and straps, and almost wrecked the bike multiple times, riding in the dark. I finally hit the bed at 4:15 AM. I will never, ever ride Amtrak again!
It was all worth it, though, because I got to watch Jen jumping her horse, Santi. I ended up there for the better part of 3 days (because my Southwest flight also was massively delayed - go figure). Horse jumping is an interesting sport and a whole event and community - it takes so much infrastructure to get up and running that they do it over a number of days and it takes over a whole campground area, including VIP sections, food trucks, a makeshift barn, people to groom and exercise the horses, etc., etc. Jen did great! I might explain more about the sport itself in the future, but it’s basically what you imagine; a horse and rider, together, trying to navigate a complex series of gates and jumps as fast as possible without knocking any over. It looks really hard.
We also had time for a little fun, including a trip to In-N-Out, and an escape room! The escape room was a bit meh. It was quite expensive, and the physical makeup of the room was pretty suspect. It was a lot of PVC and foam and broken locks, which…is a little disappointing given how much it cost. We still had a lot of fun, mind you - the lady staffing it was nice, it was pirate themed, and we just barely finished it. But, yeah, can’t say I highly recommend that particular room.
All in all, a very interesting and worthwhile trip. Some highs, some lows, but worth the journey and I learned a ton.
