San Diego's Weekend Driver

Hard to believe it’s been a year since I had one of my all-time great vacations… a trip up Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner and Coast Starlight to Seattle, then a driving tour from one end of Washington to the other. Hope you enjoy this video of the Coast Starlight running through the mountain snows in Oregon. [...]

Here’s another video from the Coast Starlight, tunnel to tunnel in the Cascades. From Feb. 9, 2011.

Here’s a blog entry from my Starlight 2011 trip that I forgot to post. Enjoy. Thursday, Feb. 10, Seattle I awoke in Seattle on Feb. 10 to a spectacularly clear day. One of those where the locals run to the Space Needle for lunch, where I was headed. The waiter, before serving my entree of [...]

From my Starlight trip, a blog entry I wrote but didn’t post. Enjoy… Around Mt. Shasta, Feb. 10 After a decent night’s sleep, those of us on the Coast Starlight today awoke to blue skies as we looped around Mt. Shasta. The big rock is covered with snow and glistened in the morning sun. I [...]

Winter drive through the Cascades and across state finds great vistas and no challenges for Lincoln MKT. The famous LeMay Auto Museum ain’t bad, either.

Since this is finishing my first round-trip up the West Coast and I’m not a weatherman, I don’t know how fast or big storms are.All I can say is that it started raining and snowing on Monday in Cle Elum, Wash., and here it is Thursday on the train in Paso Robles, Calif., and it’s [...]

After the bus trip to Portland, it’s been a nice ride down the west coast. My dinner last night was a fine piece of halibut in the dining car. Dining on a train is a great experience; watching the world go by and the waiters managing to work from a tiny prep area and never [...]

Who would guess that there’s rain in the Northwest. So a mudslide on the tracks between Kelso and Portland put all Portland-south passengers on buses. The train could get through, but they didn’t want passengers onboard through the mud.Lunch (included for sleeper passengers like me) was a Subway box lunch.With no stops (or mudslides) on [...]

So a few things I learned about GPS on the train and when I got to Seattle. First, I left my trusty Garmin Nuvi at home, thinking I would rely on the GPS I expected to have in the car I would drive, plus the two (count ‘em, two) GPS systems in my Android phone. [...]

After a decent night’s sleep, those of us on the Coast Starlight today awoke to blue skies as we looped around Mt. Shasta. The big rock is covered with snow and glistened in the morning sun. I popped into the dining car to enjoy an early breakfast (not one of Amtrak’s best) while we twisted [...]