A Tale of Two Shippies

[rafinmd]

One side note on Amtrak. Except on the Northeast Corridor (Washington-Boston) they are tenants on host railroads, often with second class priority and have been chronically late. It appears that with the depressed economy the rail lines have been busy and their on-time performance has been much better the last year or two.

[southessex-gary]

Post you email address and I'll give you the gen.

 

tazman@blueyonder.co.uk

[GCurry]

Well Tex, it's not that I don't fly at all but I avoid it if I can. It's more the airports than the flying. I find the whole experience tacky and depressing.

I can certainly relate to that, as I seem to have spent a great deal of my life in airports. Some are certainly worse than others, Hartsfield in Atlanta comes to mind, two terminal changes and five gate changes this last Xmas.:mad:

 

And since time is something we have plenty of and I like rail travel it seemed like a good thing to do, and it was. We throughly enjoyed the experience. I have to say though that the folks who were on the same trip and took the Amtrak at a different times to us weren't so impressed so maybe we were lucky, or maybe we are just easily pleased, but then there was a lot of whining overall as I put in my report.

The distances down here make rail prohibitive, it would take you forever to get anywhere. They've talked of high speed service between Houston and Dallas but talk is all it is.

 

 

About 3 or 4 years ago we had a couple of weeks driving around Alaska and the Yukon, then drove from Vancouver to Edmonton and went right across to Toronto by train. Without looking it up I think it was the Blue and Silver route or something like that. We stopped off at a couple of places on the way and just loved those big railway hotels that are left over from the glory days.

That must have been quite a trip, we drove a lot of that area before and during a cruise from Anchorage to Vancouver. I'd love to go back.

 

 

With ref to RCCI we liked it, don't know if I would like to do any more than 13/14 day trips but we had a good time. Some things better than Cunard some things not as good, strokes for folks. I won't be deserting Cunard any time soon but there is a dearth of TA's next year so I may be forced to fly one way, we'll see

I found it interesting that you would do two crossings with few ports included. We enjoy island hopping the Caribbean with few sea days, but as you say different strokes.