Thursday Travel Thoughts
How do you Decide on Vacation Destinations?
The trouble with reading a lot of blogs and news articles about travel is that when I see something interesting, I can spend hours researching it. Recently I read an article stating Amtrak and Greyhound were going to add WI-Fi to their coaches. The article made me wonder what it would be like to take a big family trip via train.
Since we live outside Denver, the only choice for Amtrak travel is the Zephyr route which links Chicago to Emeryville, CA (San Francisco). Being a mid-west girl the idea of heading west appealed to me.
Wondering what it would cost for my family of 6, I plugged some dates into the Amtrak site. Deciding on the week of spring break, the site informed me it would be $392 to get out there and $492 to get back. Round trip $884. Oh, did I mention? The trip is 33 hours long. ONE WAY. Yikes!
I know, I know. It’s about the trip, the experience, the ever changing vista out the train windows. But 33 hours? Maybe not for a first time train trip. I decided to look at something closer. Salt Lake City sounded nice.
I plugged in the info for a trip from Denver to Salt Lake City. The travel time dropped to 15 hours. The price dropped to $536 round trip. However, the arrival time into Salt Lake City was 11:05PM and the departure time back to Denver was 3:30AM. AM, as in morning! 😉 With four kids? No thank you.
My interest in train travel has quickly diminished. That hour of research was wasted.
I really need to restrain myself when I read travel articles!
What trips have you spent time researching only to find out wouldn’t work for your big family?
