My mom doesn’t want to fly and the rest of us want to go to vegas this summer. So what travel options are there for her.
Offhand I can think of
Train, bus, personal auto, maybe a boat and that is about it. She isn’t riding a bus, I thought about a train but that sounds like it’d cost alot to go from Indiana to Vegas and back. Amtrak’s website is screwy right now so I can’t check prices.
What other reasonably affordable methods are there?
If you’re going to Vegas, I think you can rule out the boat option. Amtrack may be your only alternative other than getting in the car and driving (Like you, I don’t consider the bus an option).
Yeah, boat doesn’t sound realistic, but I figured there may be some sort of service that travels domestically along the major rivers in the US. Even if there is one, it probably goes 10mph tops.
Only US river travel I know of is on the Mississippi or Ohio rivers via paddlewheeler (Mississippi Queen or Delta Queen).
What’s wrong with the bus? It’s cheap, tickets are probably no more than $200 both ways for one person if bought at the last minute, much less if you buy weeks in advance and use “buddy saver” or group packages, not to mention student or senior discounts. I don’t find Grayhound buses to be dirty or cramped; sure there are a few crazy people on the bus but aren’t there ones on planes too? I’ve never been on the train, but I know it’s more expensive than the bus. I’d really like to know what people have against buses.
Are there any trains that go directly to Vegas? If not, you may end up having to take the bus for a few hours from the nearest station.
Time required
Other Passengers - there may also be ppl with which I don’t want to associate on an airplane, but I only have to spend a couple of hours with them instead of multiple days
Well, according to Amtrack, it looks like you’d need to first catch a bus to Chicago, then take a train from there.
The bus stops at every bush, tree, and tumbleweed between here and there. It also gets stuck in traffic just like your car does. I rode the gray dog once and that’s it. Plus, bus stations are always a great place to be picked up for a life of crack-whoredom. It’s just unpleasant.
Surreptitiously drug your mother, bringing her to Vegas by air, and then be sitting in a vehicle on the ground when she wakes up, and deny everything.
Drive. Rent an RV if you need more space.
Mapquest says that it’s 28 hours to drive by way of Denver, which could easily be done in two days if three prople drove. You could also go south to I-40 and stop off at the Grand Canyon.
You could always not take her. It’s a two-day trip each way, which is a large chunk out of a 14-day holiday.
I suggest you’ll be better off persuading her to fly.
Rivers? Have you looked at a map?
I’ll have to withdraw that partly, because many maps can give you the wrong idea. There’s a story (no cite–seen on the History Channel) about some German POWs who were interned somewhere in New Mexico. A “river” ran near their prison camp, so they planned to hop the fence and fashion a crude raft so they could escape down this river. The only flaw was that they didn’t realize that in the West, most rivers are bone-dry most of the year!
Definitely Amtrak is your only option, except I don’t think an actual train goes to Vegas anymore. You’d be taking the Southwest Chief, and I think the closest that comes is Needles, CA. From there you’d have to take a bus (which Amtrak operates). The entire trip would probably take a couple of days each way, between Chicago and Vegas. It can be expensive or cheap depending on whether you book sleeping accommodations or not; if you’re willing to forego those and sit in the coach the whole way, it’s quite cheap. Even then you can still get up and walk around, go to the observation car, and so on. If you book sleeping accommodations be prepared to pay an astromomical price, but the upside of that is that your meals in the dining car would be included.
I’d almost rather stay home than go the whole way by car. The sitting in cramped quarters for hours on end, gas stops, bathroom stops, meal stops, having to be attentive to the road, etc., etc., take just about all the fun out of a trip, for me.
Sure you might have crazy people on the train or plane, but on the latter you only have to endure it for a few hours. On the train you can go to the cafe or observation car, or just find another coach in which to sit. On the bus you’re just stuck. And it’s not always that much cheaper than the train. Then you have road traffic causing bus delays, meal stops because nothing’s available onboard, and for most, the whole thing is a slow bore.
Wow…35 hours from Chicago to Needles, CA.
You could easily drive a rental car here faster and cheaper.
However, if she does take the train to Needles, you could drive there and pick her up and stop in Laughlin for a night on the way up to Las Vegas…small place, on the Colorado River, with a few nice casinos and a mall, but the river is nice and midweek in the summer you can get a great room for about $35!
Maybe she could get her knitting group/church group/tap dancing club to join in and charter a bus direct from there to here. That way she would be with a bunch of friends the entire way, and it would probably wind up to be faster and cheaper per person.
Of course, then you get to entertain your mom AND 48 lovely ladies from Indiana here in SinCity. Hmm…driving down to Needles to pick her up is sounding better by the minute.
I’ve taken two intercity bus trips in my life, and only over a distance of about 120 miles. One of those had relatively few stops and wasn’t too bad speedwise, only it smelled like cigarettes. This was in the 1970s, when smoking was allowed, and the smoke got into every surface aboard the bus. The other bus trip was between downtown L.A. and San Diego, and that really did stop at every place along the way. We weren’t even on the highway most of the time; instead we were just galumphing from the main drag of one town as it bled into the next town. To be absolutely fair, the buses weren’t terrible, but that second one sure was slow.