My wife, Zippi, and I just got back from our cross-country honeymoon and we had quite the adventure along the way. We decided to ditch the car at the Atlanta airport for the week and take Amtrak’s California Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco. The views from Lake-Michigan-to-shining-sea were spectacular.
After bidding adieu to our trusty minivan at Hartsfield-Jackson, Delta deposited us most graciously at Chicago’s O’Hare International. The CrowdStrike computer outage ensured a late arrival. Fortunately, the Blue Line runs ’round the clock and got us from the airport to our hotel downtown, luggage and everything, for $3 a person.
When we woke, we had a little time to kill before our train was scheduled to depart, so we explored downtown Chicago on foot. Right outside our hotel door, we were pleasantly surprised to see a well-used bicycle lane and plenty of available Lyft rental bikes, ready to roll.
We snagged coffee and a bagel, then poked around the nine story Harold Washington Library, where every manner of book and public service could be found— including a vending machine full of socks, soap, and other essentials for folks experiencing homelessness. Free of charge. Just swipe your gov’t-issued ID.
Lunchtime and our hotel checkout rolled around, so we rolled our luggage on over to Portillo’s for some of those famous Chicago-style hotdogs (“dragged through the garden”). We boarded our train at Union Station, bade farewell to the Chicago skyline, and got settled in for the first of two nights aboard the train. The “chooka-chooka” put us right to sleep as our train’s wheels rolled through Iowa cornfields throughout the night.
Our first lengthy stop was in Denver, where we were able to step out of the train and stretch our legs for an hour. Like Chicago before it, there were plenty of well-used bicycle lanes. With the mountains peeking behind the buildings, it was immediately apparent that Denver is a place to enjoy the out-of-doors.
The train ride winding through the Rockies in Colorado was easily worth the price of admission. You simply don’t get the same sense of grandeur from the window of an airplane! Utah, surprisingly, refused to be upstaged and wowed us with her own colorful mesas and expansive stretches of uninhabited public lands.
The last stretch of our train trip went through Sacramento, Davis, and eventually concluded in Emeryville, California. Davis is, of course, one of the top cities in the United States for bicycling, but even Emeryville had plastic bollard-protected lanes all over the place near the train station.
We rode a bus that dropped us off at the Salesforce transit center in San Francisco’s Financial District, then hopped into a Waymo self-driving car (which just recently became largely available to the public). We were amazed by the experience— the car immediately impressed us by detecting and stopping for a last-minute jaywalker that would’ve been obscured by the car’s A-pillar and potentially struck by a regular old human driver.
The technology demonstrated by our Waymo cab is a peek into the promise of tomorrow’s automobile, but San Francisco is not a city that is friendly to the automobile. Folks are stuck in traffic everywhere because of the sheer population density of the city. Fortunately, it is incredibly easy to get around by walking, public transit, and the humble bicycle. In the sense of transportation, it is pretty much the exact opposite of Warner Robins, with its high speed arterial roads and enormous distances between destinations that inhibit safe bipedal transportation.
Far from the dreary environment that such a population density might suggest, San Francisco is also the friendliest place I’ve ever visited. We met many amazing folks, including a police officer at the corner coffee shop who told us that he came to the city to drop a car off and stayed for 30 years.
On our last full day, we rented a pair of bicycles and bombed around the city. We visited the Financial District, Embarcadero, the Maritime Museum Park, Coit Tower, Chinatown, Lombard Street, and eventually returned our bicycles to take a night ferry to Alcatraz. I wouldn’t recommend these routes for those that aren’t experienced riding a bicycle in the road, but the slow speeds of San Francisco’s streets made it plenty safe (and, dare I say, fun?) for us. I would 100% own a bicycle and ride it everywhere if I lived in the Bay Area.
Alas, our funds and PTO hours nudged us back to San Francisco International Airport, onto our second plane, and back to our almost-forgotten automobile in the Hartsfield-Jackson West Lot. We paid for our parking hands-free with Peach Pass Plus, then got ourselves re-acclimated to not having the public transit chauffeur we had come to enjoy.
While Warner Robins is a far cry from having the population density of San Francisco, Chicago, or Denver, we couldn’t help but think of how much nicer it is to have the option of leaving our car at home. For those who do not, or can not drive a car, it is more than a nicety— it is a necessity, and it was a breath of fresh (albeit sometimes foggy) air to experience these places built for people first.
This article was featured in the Houston Home Journal:
https://hhjonline.com/our-honeymoon-without-a-car/
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