Michigan Family Reunion - Home to Chicago

Thursday, June 12, 2025 to Monday, June 16

 The Coast Starlight San Luis Obispo to Seattle - Thursday and Friday

The first leg of our trip is on the Amtrak Coast Starlight taking us from San Luis Obispo to Seattle.

Our train route to Chicago.  The first leg is on the Coast Starlight from San Luis Obispo to Chicago and then we'll take the Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago.

Val’s friend Marsha picked us up around one and drove us to the train station in San Luis Obispo.  Since the train didn’t leave until three, we had time to have lunch together at the nearby Bon Tempe Creole Café.  After lunch we had only a short wait until it was time to board the train. and we were on our way.

Here are some pictures of our bedroom on the train.  All pictures on this trip, for better or worse, are taken with our cell phones.

Our train is arriving in San Luis Obispo.

This was Val's seat during the trip, at night the couch folds down to make the lower bunk.  The thing above her head is the upper bunk that can be lowered.

The smaller seat is where I usually sit, so we can both look out the window.

This is the small sink we have.

This is photo of one side of the room taken by me sitting on the couch shooting at mirror.

This is the spacious bathroom, you can do your business on the toilet while taking a shower.  It's pretty cramped, but it beats having to get dressed and go find a bathroom in the hallway at night.

We love riding the train and it is a very relaxing and stress-free way to travel if you’re not in a hurry.  We are in a bedroom in a sleeper car and except for the hassle of going to bed and then getting up, it is very nice.  The bedrooms are quite nice, and you even have your own bathroom, albeit a very small one (more like a closet).  The room is relatively spacious until it’s time to make up the beds and that’s where the hassle comes in.

Once the lower and upper bunks come down there is much less room to move around and for two people it’s a bit of a dance.  We have done it many times, but it is our least favorite time on the train.  In the morning it’s the same thing until you are dressed and ready and the bunks go back up.

This how it looks when the beds are down, Val is in the lower and I'm in the upper once again shooting the reflection in the mirror.

When you travel in a sleeper car in either a roomette or bedroom, all meals are included in the dining car.  All seating in the dining car are tables for four, and because of limited space, you are almost always going to share your table with someone else.  Val and I usually prefer to eat by ourselves, but on the train, that is not possible, and it turns out to be one of the best things about riding the train.  You end up meeting people from all over from all walks of life and we really enjoy it.

This is the dinner menu, it has less items available that it used to.

This is the breakfast and lunch menu which offers a little more variety than dinner.  The burger and grilled cheese sandwich are quite good in my opinion.

On this trip we met a very nice couple from Texas who, like us, love to travel and they also like to cruise, but for shorter ones than we like.  Another meal we sat with a mother and daughter who live in Honolulu and were here to visit friends in San Jose.  Another couple we met were from New Jersey and were taking their very first long train trip.  They had taken the California Zephyr from Chicago and were now heading for Seattle.  Somehow the Rocky Mountaineer Train in Canada that Val and I took came up and it turned out they really wanted to do that, so we spent quite a bit of time talking about it.

Seattle - Friday Night and Saturday Morning

Surprisingly, the train arrived in Seattle at 7:30 PM, 20 minutes early.  We stayed in Seattle overnight as the train to Chicago didn’t leave until just before five in the afternoon the next day.  We are staying at the Embassy Suites Pioneer Square that is right across the street from the train station and very convenient.  This is the same hotel we stayed at last year before catching the train home after our Alaskan Cruise.

Since we hadn’t checked any luggage, we were in our room in about twenty minutes after getting off the train; as I said; very convenient.  Because of our early arrival in Seattle, they only served an early meal in the dining car and we weren’t hungry enough then, but we were hungry after we got to our room.

Luckily the hotel has a good restaurant so after freshening up, we headed straight down to the 13 Coins Restaurant and had a good dinner before calling it a night.  We were both looking forward to a good night’s sleep in a real bed.  As I have said, we love to ride the train, but the nights are a little rough at times.

We had great views of Seattle from our room.

Our train didn’t leave until 4:55 in afternoon so we slept in and relaxed until mid-morning.  We had gotten a late checkout at 2:00 so at least we had a comfortable place to wait.  We did our final packing and went down to have lunch at the 13 Coins and then left for the train station just before 2:00.  The next leg of our journey is almost here.

 

Empire Builder Seattle to Chicago - Saturday to Monday

The Seattle train station is quite nice and has recently been renovated.  The upstairs mezzanine area has been turned into an arts area that includes a children’s gallery.  Since we had plenty of time before our train left, we spent some time going through the gallery and the art display was very good.

The tall building on the left is our hotel.  I took this picture standing in front of the train station so you can see how close and convenient it is.

The King Street Station in Seattle.  It has been recently renovated and is very nice.

Looking down at the station from the mezzanine.

The train boarded around 4:40 and we were on our way right on time at 4:55.  Val and I have always wanted to take the Amtrak Empire Builder Train that runs across the northern United States and now we were underway.  For the first hour or two we traveled north along Puget Sound, and it was a beautiful stretch of coastline.  From there we turned east and passed through a heavily forested mountainous area. 

Most of the trip across Washington and Idaho was in the dark, but the next morning we did pass by the southern end of Glacier National Park in Montana, and that was very scenic.  After coming down out of the mountains, we entered the Great Plains of Montana.  We had left the spectacular scenery of the mountains behind us, but it was still interesting scenery as we passed through the mostly empty plains.  For most of the way across the Plains, the train followed US Highway 2.  Val and I had driven US2 quite a few years ago on a trip to Michigan, but we were seeing the route from a different perspective now.

Once again, we met some very nice people while eating our meals.  We had dinner with a couple from Florida whose compartment was near ours.  We really hit it off and talked for quite a while.  We also met a father and daughter who had got on the train in West Glacier after visiting Wharton National Park just across the border from Glacier in Canada.  They had originally been from Canada but were now living in Wisconsin and were heading home.

We ate lunch with a young man who was a software developer in Seattle and was on his way to Chicago to visit his family in Illinois.  At another meal we met a couple from Omaha, Nebraska who had visited Glacier National Park and were now headed home.  They would change trains in Chicago and take the California Zephyr back to Omaha.  Finally, we had our last meal of the trip with a couple from Minneapolis who were headed to Chicago for a weekend visit.

We really enjoyed talking to everyone on this trip and as I have already said, meeting people is a real bonus of train travel.  The reason I have included a little description of everyone we met is because Val and I occasionally try to recall people we’ve met on the train and have forgotten about, so now we can look at the blog and remember.

The train ride on the Empire Builder was very nice and we really enjoyed it.  Surprisingly the train was on time almost the whole way until we reached Minneapolis where a private car was added to the train.  For some reason it took almost an hour to do that.  There was also a lot of freight and commuter traffic between Milwaukee and Chicago, and that delayed us some more.  We ended up getting into Chicago just after six, an hour and a half late.

Chicago - Monday Evening and Tuesday Morning

Chicago Union Station

We got off the train expecting to find Red Caps, but there weren’t any.  The Red Caps are very handy as they will load your luggage onto their carts and drive you into the station, pick up any checked luggage you might have and if you want a taxi, they’ll take you to the taxi area.  We ended up taking the long walk down the platform to the station hauling our own luggage.  When we got into the station we could see why there were no Red Caps, the station was a mess.  Chicago Union Station is undergoing a major renovation and there was construction everywhere.  You had to weave in and out blocked off areas and it was all very confusing and crowded as there were narrow aisles with passengers getting on and off trains creating a pedestrian traffic jam.

We had some checked luggage, and the luggage pickup location was not in the usual location (it actually might have been, but with all the construction no one could find it).  We were part of a group of people from our train wandering around trying to find the luggage pickup and finally someone found it, what a confusing mess.

After finally getting our checked luggage, we headed off to get a taxi and that was a bit of a challenge in itself.  Union Station is below street level so to exit the station you have to go up to the ground level and many of the entrances were blocked off.  Everybody with luggage needed to use the elevator so there was a large crowd gathered at the only one we could find.  We thought we would have a long wait, but surprisingly the elevator was very large and almost everyone fit.

After leaving the station, we made our way to the usual taxi pickup / drop-off area and found people milling around, but no taxis.  Val and I waited for a few minutes and then she took things into our own hands.  She walked down the street past the people waiting and started waving down passing taxis and pretty quickly, one stopped, and we were on our way to our hotel.

LondonHouse Hotel - Monday Night

We are staying at the LondonHouse Chicago Hotel that is right downtown at the corner of Wacker Drive and Michigan Ave. right across from the Chicago River.  It was a bit of a splurge as it is a very nice hotel, but it was pretty close to Union Station and very close to the car rental agency where we’ll pick up our rental tomorrow.  It was a short ride to the hotel, and we were soon checked in and in our room.  It was a very nice corner room with great views of the Chicago downtown skyline and the Chicago River.

We had a corner room with great views of the city and Chicago River.

We were hungry so after settling in, we checked in with the concierge and asked about a restaurant.  There was a street level restaurant, but she suggested LH On 21,  a bar and restaurant on the 21^st floor of our hotel that also had outside seating and a bar on the rooftop.  She said they were fully booked, but hotel guests had priority, so we decided to give it a try and were we glad we did.

We took the elevator to 21st floor and checked in with the hostess who said we’d have about a 20-to-30-minute wait, so we decided to wait.  We waited in the inside bar area and had a drink, and the 20 to 30 minutes turned into 45, but finally there was a table ready, and we took the elevator up to the rooftop.

There was a bar area that was very crowded with people standing around, but we were led through the crowd to our table, and we were stunned.  It was a beautiful balmy evening, and the views of the city were amazing, it was an incredibly nice place to eat after a rather rough evening at the train station. 

For dinner we had tapas and split a salad and topped it off with a delicious dessert and it was excellent.  This restaurant was so crowded and popular, they actually had a time limit for how long you could linger at your table.  There was plenty of time to eat, but if given the chance, we would have loved to have stayed much longer enjoying the evening and atmosphere, but that’s why they have a time limit, so we had to leave and that was fair as there were many others waiting.  One comment I have to make, we were probably old enough to be grandparents of most of the crowd there and even great grandparents for many, but we still had a great time. 😊

Views from the rooftop.

This evening was worth the cost of the hotel and the hassles of getting off the train, we really enjoyed it.  After dinner we returned to our room and soon called it a night.  After two nights on the train, a real bed will feel very nice, and we don’t have to leave early tomorrow so we can sleep in.