Coast Starlight

A new, expanded, edit from the previous post because I’ve processed all the photos now. This looks better on exposure.so if you want to view it there all fancy shmancy.

After a short visit to Los Angeles, we decided to take the train up the coast rather than fly to San José. It’s kind of nice to walk in to Union Station and actually wait in the grand old waiting room. Definitely more leisurely than flying. Also a lot more laid-back than rushing to catch a Metro line.

The first part of the trip winds out of LA through the backside of industry and big box stores. We sat in our seats on the second floor and snacked and lunched for this portion. It looks like most urban train rides, albeit with fewer stops. But there are still a lot of things worth photographing.

Once we left LA, we had to go through the mountains and make our way past some agricultural land on our way to the coast.

After a few hours, we finally hit the coast. We moved up to the lounge car for the bigger, better windows for this part as the train runs right along the coast—sometimes at sea level, other times up on a cliff—and you get to watch the waves roll by for hours and hours and hours.

Before San Luis Obispo, we turned inland again and began to see hills and farms instead of water. The sun was also beginning to set as we started to climb back through the mountains into the Salinas valley. It would have been nice to get an ocean sunset. But a mountain one is also pretty nice. Once the sun set though, there wasn’t much more to photograph. The last photo here is from Paso Robles.