Recently, I had to travel from the San Francisco Bay Area down to Southern California. (And, yes, it did include a visit to Disneyland.)
There were a variety of choices available on how to make the trip. The usual is a long drive down Interstate 5. From Livermore to the Park usually takes about six to seven hours, with several stops. A personal fave is a meal at Harris Ranch in Coalinga. Ummmmm, pot roast.
In the past, I have also traveled using Amtrak. A bus connection from Livermore takes one to Stockton for one of the “San Joaquin” trains to Bakersfield and another bus ride on to Los Angeles Union Station. Or the option of riding Amtrak’s most popular train, the “Coast Starlight” with 113 miles hugging the Coast and the Pacific Ocean. Great scenery, nice food, but a long day’s ride.
So, now we come to air travel. Leading the pack is Southwest Airlines and it’s cattle call method of meeting passenger needs. United and others also fly between the three Nor Cal airports (San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland) to the Southland (Los Angeles, Burbank, Ontario, Orange County and San Diego). If you plan far enough ahead of time, there tend to be attractive fares for all of the possible combinations of departures and arrivals.
In this post 9/11 travel world, we also get the variety of airport amusements from the multitude ID checks to having ones shoes x-rayed (Yes, it happened to me.) With the minions of the Federal Transportation Security Administration all busy to keep themselves employed, there are endless opportunities for entertainment. Personally, coming back from Germany to the US last year, I got the security experience to end them all, and everything since has been almost amateur in scope.
A new wrinkle offered another opportunity in the travel mix. Long Beach is again open for air travel, thanks to Jet Blue. In the past, Alaska and others had offered this as an alternative. I preferred it for travel to and from the Park, actually being closer than Orange County’s “John Wayne International”. Now that construction is finished on the Highway 91 and Interstate 5 projects as well as the Disneyland Drive interchange, getting from the freeways to the Park is relatively simple.
In Oakland, Jet Blue flies in and out of Terminal 1, with Southwest taking all of Terminal 2 (and overflowing into Terminal 1 as well). Screening was fairly quick, with only my belt buckle setting the machines off. (I traveled with a friend who just had a quadruple bypass and is held together with a stainless steel wire in his sternum. He didn’t set off the machines, but I did! Grumble, grumble, grumble…)
Thanks to a little hold over from a very rainy day, our flight was delayed by about 20 minutes. Jet Blue flies the Airbus A230 as opposed to Southwest and it’s Boeing 737-300’s. The Airbus offers a wider cabin (or at least it seems bigger) with leather seats, more leg room and individual video screens at each seat. And unlike Southwest, Jet Blue offers assigned seating. Using their web pages, you can choose your seat at the time you purchase your ticket. When boarding, passengers are offered blue headsets (which you are actually asked to keep). On the screens, Direct TV offers a choice of 25 channels with everything from ESPN, NBC, Food TV, Telemundo and Nickelodeon. One channel offers Mapquest with speed and altitude updates.
Due to the short duration of the flight, beverage choices were limited to Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite and bottled water. No cocktails were offered for sale. Snack choices were chocolate chip cookies, bagel chips or biscotti.
Service was quick, as was the pickup of trash. Jet Blue cleans the planes in flight to reduce to layover time between arrival and departure. On our return, the plane flew from JFK in New York City to Long Beach to Oakland and then was headed back to JFK with a red-eye flight — but not with the same crew.
Baggage claim was quick and painless in Long Beach, unlike the drama of such places as LAX. Rental car was also a piece of cake in Long Beach. Walk out of the terminal, and they’re all in a trailer just across the street, with cars parked behind. A Chevron station just outside the airport had decent prices for gas to fill the car before return.
All in all, this was the best of the choices for us this trip. After our arrival, and a quick trip to Anaheim on a rainy Friday night, we were enjoying a cocktail and dessert in front of warm fireplace at the Hearthstone Lounge, at the Grand Californian Hotel, less than an hour after the plane landed.
As the late Jonathan Harris was famed for saying, “Oh, the pain…”
Harris Ranch