Weekends and recreation

Topics on this page include group trips, trip planning strategies, and traveling with bikes and/or backpacks on transit. This page offers strategies for dealing with the cabin fever that can come along with being car-free. Some of these strategies may be helpful to people who want to reduce their car use or to travelers with lots of time and little money (those lucky visitors from the land of Oz with their long vacations come to mind). Strategies are arranged from simple to complex. As usual, my examples come mainly from Northern California, but I am not including many links on this page because transit systems and parks are always changing.

Getting around on transit on weekends or in areas new to you often takes more time, but, to paraphrase the great Alfred E. Neuman, "What, me hurry?" Transit delays are not such a big deal when you are not trekking to work. The crazy people you meet on vacation are part of the adventure—I particularly enjoyed the life story told to me on one Anchorage bus line—while the ones on your daily commute may just be annoying.

Easy strategies

If you are comfortable driving, renting a car for the entire trip is the easiest type of trip to plan. It can be inexpensive because you can stay anywhere and it is nice to take a big dose of mobility every once in a while. However, I do not like driving around cities, which if they are worth visiting, are best seen on foot or bike, with bus, cab, or ferry trips for variety. But renting a car is my favorite option for exploring rural areas for the first time. You can always try another strategy if you return. Car rental is discussed in more detail on the Busgrrrl Hauling Page.

In many regions, there are recreation sites that offer wilderness experiences accessible from their major urban areas. Getting yourself to a park near a city or large town, especially on weekends, is an easy option that may not require transfers or much planning. If you can stay overnight or get there on a system that runs late, it is even easier to relax on such a trip. Beaches, lakes, bikeways, and hikers' parks are often accessible on big city transit lines. Point Reyes National Seashore has access via major transit systems, as do other hiking and beach spots in Monterey, San Mateo, and Marin Counties, Angel Island near San Francisco, Redwood Park in Oakland, Point Pinole in Richmond, and the American River Parkway in Sacramento. Access to some parks may be available only on weekends, and camping sites, if any, are hard to get at parks near cities.

Another easy way to explore wilder places, particularly for the first time, is by joining a hiking or biking section of an outdoor-activities group that meets at carpool/transit sites. By joining I mean meeting up with, as you usually don't have to become a local or national member just to take a trip with these groups. Other places to find group trips to green places are outdoor-gear stores, campus and singles-group recreation sections, college classes in earth or ecological sciences, and special interest education groups like native plant societies or museums. One disadvantage of group tours is the regimented nature of some. Another issue is that if the starting point of the trip is far away or otherwise hard to get to, a group trip is not such an easy strategy.

City transit systems themselves sometimes offer special trips to popular places. For example, Samtrans in the Bay Area has offered trips to see the elephant seals in season. Operators of festivals also sometimes offer special event shuttles, in part to reduce traffic impacts. Chico (a college town up north) has a snow goose festival with shuttle service from town out to view the birds. Many large events like conventions or garden shows also shuttle attendees.

Another quick cure for cabin-fever is simply playing tourist nearby, visiting a town or neighborhood located on your transit lines. Any place that is reasonably walkable and has some attractions works: in my region, I have explored Folsom, Martinez, Point Richmond, Davis, Napa, and many lesser known parts of San Francisco and Oakland on foot. This only requires a little preparation and bringing some good walking shoes and maps. A guidebook geared for walkers, like anything with "hidden", "stairway walks" or such in its title, is also great to have. This strategy may not cure your cabin fever if you need to get out in the woods to relax, but it may hold you for a while.

A possibility many people do not consider is that inns and hostels in scenic spots may offer guest pickup. This is I think particularly true of small bed and breakfasts and larger resorts. I once got an unexpected ride to a Sierran lodge from a nearby Amtrak bus stop when I called for walking directions. When talking with an innkeeper in the Adirondacks of New York about trains in the area, he mentioned that he frequently picks people up from the train station several miles away. This train-inn connection is part of the history of many of older resort towns: trains brought them customers long before highways did. Smaller places also often have bike rentals and transit schedules available to guests, so you can get out and about without a car after you arrive.

In unfamiliar urban destinations, cross-town buses can be interesting, for example, Muni's 30 Stockton in San Francisco, though crowded, and sections of AC Transit's 51, 7, and 9 bus lines in Oakland/Berkeley offer good neighborhood tours with some nice scenery.

Many towns with limited or inconvenient intercity service have airport shuttles that may drop you off when and where you want to go. Sometimes these are no more expensive than Greyhound or Amtrak. Some places put major bus stops in really inconvenient locations (Santa Fe, N.M., for one), while the shuttles can take you right to your hotel or downtown. If the airport is easy to get to, these make sense even if you are arriving by train or bus. You generally have to research and reserve these rides a week or two before you arrive.

Medium-difficulty strategies

Trip planning in areas with good road networks and at least passable transit service is pretty much the same everywhere. First, you figure out where you can get to without a car. Second, you decide if this still founds fun. If it does, then stay mainly in a central area, or base camp as hikers call it, but venture out from your base station. This is a good strategy if you like a lot of variety on a vacation. I personally do not like traveling long distances to spend all my time in an urban area. A base station can be a huge city like London or Chicago with an extensive rail network around it or a smaller regional or tourist center. When I visited England, British Rail offered lots of ideas for day-rail trips out of London. I found out the somewhat-hard way that they did not recommend this strategy just because many tourists don't like to repack every day; it can be much faster and even cheaper to travel from the center of a rail hub outward to the edges than to travel a shorter distance around the hub, say from the Lake District to York. So, a base station strategy may leave you more time and money for having fun.

When planning a base station trip, also keep in mind that staying at least a few days at a hostel or a central hotel increases your chances of catching a ride some place outside the transit network. I stayed at the Everglades Hostel in Florida City while driving because it was nice, but it also turned out to have its own van, canoes, guides, and more. Vancouver, B.C.'s hostels had everything from urbane walking tours to trips to the mountains, all leaving from their doorsteps. A hostel's or hotel's Web site may not list specific times and destinations, but it should, as the Everglades site does, give you some idea if it offers trips out of town. An inn's Web site should also tell you if the hotel is on transit, but I find this is often not true. Call the hotel up at a slow time of the day before you get there because they may have good advice about getting around and out of town. If you find an inn with a wealth of offerings, it can become a base station for a future trip.

If you prefer a fancier means of relaxation such as taking food tours or wine tasting, staying a few days in a tourist mecca should also help you connect with a tour. Hotels in Napa Valley towns on the main highway frequently offer trips to wineries and such, because of course, even those with cars do not want to taste and drive (unless they actually following the directions and spit out the wine!). Since some of these tours are trying to attract locals, they go to interesting, out of the way places that many driving visitors might never get to. Catching a tourist train, like the popular Napa Valley Wine Train, the Santa Fe in you-know-where, or the sometimes-running Skunk Train, is also possible in many tourist meccas, although the best routes often require a car to get to. A variation on a tourist train is regular scenic-route service. This train or bus service may actually get you somewhere you want to go, or it may just be a fun round trip. The local bus trips from Ventura to the hills of Ojai and around the island of Kuaui were two of the most scenic and entertaining trips I have ever taken on any transportation mode, cost me less than $5, and did not subject me to a tour-guide script.

Catching a short adventurous tour, such as a bike tour or a camping- or sports-oriented bus/van trip, does not directly require complicated planning. Someone does all the tour-planning for you. However, in any one region, there may be so few trips available that you almost have to plan your entire vacation around the operators' schedules. In New Orleans, I stayed near downtown to do city things but also found out before arriving in the the Big Easy that some of the swamp tour operators pick up travelers with reservations downtown. This meant I did not have to rent a car, yet I got my fill of looking at swamp things. New Orleans, by the way, is a great place to visit without a car, since it has fun streetcars and two huge parks on transit lines. Plus, I did spy a line named Desire (a bus, alas, not a streetcar).

In smaller base towns, if you can get to a big camping center, it is easier to hook up with outdoor-sports trips. RVs and RV clubs may not be for you or me, but where they congregate, tours usually follow. This is mainly because RVs are too expensive and big to drive everywhere and if RVers carry extra transportation, it's usually only a bicycle or scooter. In one campground in Redding, I noticed flyers advertising regular trips out to Mount Lassen and other scenic spots. RVers are not all blue hairs with no sense of adventure. Unfortunately, these and other small tours may run only in the summer, even in places with mild climates like most of California.

Using transit and foot power to get around and out of your base station combined with a short car rental or taxi trip is a good option if there are just one or two places you cannot get to without a car. I have also done this just to save money and time. On one winter trip, I did not want to drive in snow or black ice but used a one-day rental car to visit a couple of must-see places just outside my main base-station city. Since most rental car companies are located in downtowns or at airports, it is usually easy to combine transit and driving. Unlike airlines, they may not charge you for last minute changes in reservations, so you can easily keep your itinerary flexible.

Adventurous car-free strategies

"Adventurous" here does not necessarily mean rafting down the Colorado River, but more complicated strategies—brace yourself for advanced placement car-free travel.

Using different local and rural transit systems on one trip can be challenging, although it is easier to pull off in places with good transit networks. Instead of, for example, using the cities of Santa Rosa or Ukiah as Northern California base stations, which would be a medium-difficulty strategy, you could plan a loop through these regions, with stops at state parks or small towns on the bus line. This requires some careful planning and advance hotel/camping reservations. However, everywhere I have visited lately, transit systems are better connected than they have been in many years. The service may be spotty, but it is there. For example, commuting towns like Santa Rosa are easy to get to on major public bus systems from San Francisco. Little Vallejo now has a ferry to San Francisco, links to Amtrak and BART trains in the East Bay, and good links to VINES, the Napa County local system. Some coastal state parks in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties are on the Mendocino transit system's loops that connect most of the little towns on the coast to Ukiah or to Santa Rosa, the business/government capitals of the two counties. This kind of rural service, however, may not drop you at your park or hotel's gate, and may run only on weekdays and be quite infrequent (as bad as once or twice per day). These services seem designed to help small town people get to courts for jury duty or hospitals to visit people, i.e., places they really need to get to once in a while. Local services designed for regular riders such as workers, as the one in Napa County appears to be, run more often.

One problem with these rural systems is that they tend to have small buses with limited space for gear and bikes. Do you want to wait four hours because there were already two bikes in the bus's rack? If you are in a nice area for biking, this would not be a concern. However, a trip combining local systems may be a good time to try a folding bike or to rent a bike at your destination.

I have met many adventurous sorts who hop off and on tours to get to out of the way places. Some get dropped off without any sure means of pickup, which is pretty gutsy, especially if you do it by yourself. There are a few systems that are simpler to use. These pick up and drop off travelers on rural roads, e.g., the Green Tortoise in California, but these are rare in the U.S. and you need to negotiate a pickup time and place that works for the operators. Outside the U.S., scenic places like New Zealand, however, may offer special backpackers' shuttles, and in less developed, less litigious places, drivers may not care where you want them to stop. But, I personally long for a return of whistlestop trains that drop you off just about anywhere.

Gear and bikes on transit

Rules for carrying bikes on transit are inconsistent. Generally, in California, local buses allow two bikes or more in front of the bus on a rack. These racks can be challenging to use and they may fill up quickly. On at least one system, Sacramento RT, extra bikes may be allowed on buses on the last trip of the day. Light and other electric rail rules vary even more than those for buses, but generally bikes are allowed inside cars if they do not inconvenience or endanger other riders, which usually means no bikes during rush hour even on empty cars, or at other times of the day when the train is crowded. Bicyclists may be asked by security staff to leave buses or trains under certain circumstances. On longer Amtrak trips, they may be asked to carry their bikes to baggage. Another generalism is that ferries and regional rail lines have more room for bikes.

For longer trips, such as rail, ferry, or airplane journeys, here is a good tool for checking transit system policies around the U.S. and parts of Canada, BikesOnTransit, and a link with resources and stories about traveling with bikes on all sorts of systems around the world, Travel with Bicycles. The day of week that you travel on sometimes matters, as some trains to good biking areas, such as Amtrak's Adirondack, use different equipment to enable them to carry more bikes on some weekend runs. Different train routes have different equipment and different policies. The Northeastern/megalopolis routes of Amtrak have extra security restrictions.

As far as carrying other gear on transit goes, although it can get uncomfortable riding a crowded system with a backpack or other luggage, I have only encountered one system where backpacks were banned, Kuaui, which is generally antibackpacking. However, that garbage bag or other rain cover you should have brought with you to rainy Kuaui anyway can transform a pack into something that a bus driver can choose to ignore.

Another issue is baggage space. In the U.S., only Greyhound and Amtrak sometimes have enough room in their overhead luggage racks for a backpack. Plane luggage racks are too small, and as you may have noticed, airlines now longer attempt to accommodate anyone, any time. On trains, however, if the pack is full, it will probably have to go in the baggage areas near the doors, where you cannot keep an eye on it easily. On uncrowded trains, you used to be able to put luggage on seats, but they are cracking down on this. In general, a full backpack needs to be checked as baggage. You do not need access to camping gear while on a train, and your gear may walk off the train with someone if you do not check it. On long train trips, I have divided stuff between a small soft bag and my pack, then checked the pack or managed to fit it in my train car. Keep what you need all the time near you in the compartment over your seat; if you pack light enough, another bag may also fit up there. If you are not sure if your bag will fit or can be checked, some Amtrak stations now have bag-measuring devices like those in airports.

There is limited baggage service on many trains and at smaller stations. You may not be able to check your bag if you are getting off at a small station or riding on a local line. Research baggage service information before you begin your journey. One final point for the train novice to keep in mind: you can always reorganize and shift gear easily on trains, as they are roomier than planes and buses and sometimes even have dressing rooms and tables where you can repack.

If you have to check a bike, it needs to be packaged correctly. The requirements for carrying everything, including bikes, have changed since September 11. Now, carrying innocent gear like tire-repair canisters may delay your trip if you pack it inside your box. See more do-it-yourself bike-boxing tips at Box Your Bike! and the other bike-transit links above. Options include buying a retail bike box, saving the free box offered by some high-end bike makers, and paying a bike shop to box your bike. The cost of checking a bike as baggage varies from carrier to carrier. Some impose extra fees for bicycles beyond what they would charge for other sports equipment. Shame on them!

Bikes can also be shipped by freight companies such as UPS, but this is pretty pricey and potentially slow, especially if you are crossing national borders or are shipping to Hawaii. It may also make sense to ship home heavy gear that you will not be using on the rest of your trip, especially if you have someone willing to receive it at the other end and can get to a FedEx or other such office during working hours. I have generally used train or hotel storage facilities to travel without extra stuff. Of course, then I still have to retrieve it at some point to get it home. Another traveling-light strategy is to give away extra stuff on your travels to reduce your load, for example, books you have already read on your trip or unused cooking fuel (which is not allowed on most carriers) or supplies. This may even spread a little good will.

Of course, bicyclists who do not need to travel with their custom, beloved cycles can buy a folding bike for traveling on transit. Folding bikes are also favored by many commuter cyclists who use transit. A folding bike solves most of the bike-transit interface problems, like how to carry a bike up narrow train steps or the lack of secure bike parking at many transit stops. Even more important, folding bike users do not have to worry about arcane transit-system rules or about being left behind because the bike rack is full. Another potential advantage of a folding bike is that you can keep it with you, so it may be much harder to steal. However, they are easy to carry and hide. I have read that they are common enough on some transit systems in Europe that bike thieves are targeting them, and other nonbiking transit riders are starting to find them annoying.

The Ride This Bike blog is the best introduction I have found to folding bike equipment. I am pretty skeptical about claims that products are easy to use, but I have seen someone fold a Brompton bike in well under a minute, so I think even the coordination- and mechanically challenged among us can learn to handle some type of folding bike. Folding bikes range from $200 up to thousands of dollars for tailor-made models. The different prices do not reflect differences in fold-ability but differences in other bike features and general quality of workmanship.

Leaping lizards, Annie, a capital-list!

What follows is a small, mostly untested list of places to visit near the Capitol Corridor, an intercity train-bus system which I contend should be spelled Capital Corridor. Nevertheless, it is still a great regional travel resource. Although the U.S. passenger train network is full of gaps, these shorter intercity train lines are available around much of the U.S.

Coming soon to the capital-list: old towns that let their stations decay have thought better of it and are petitioning to be stops on the line.

• Sacramento: walk to the Crocker or Railroad Museums or galleries, bike or take light rail to points on the American River Parkway trail, connect to buses to Lake Tahoe, the Pacific Crest Trail, or other northern locations
• Davis: bike or walk anywhere, check out the public gardens or the farmer's market
• Suisun City: bike through the valley's orchards in spring, walk to the marina, bike to Rush Ranch for a marsh walk, see where Jelly Bellys ® are made in Suisun's twin-city, Fairfield
• Martinez: walk to the town museums, bike/bus to John Muir's home, walk around the marina and downtown, bike the Alhambra Valley, connect to buses for Wine and Redwood Country locations (including connections to the tourist train depots in Willits and Napa)
• Richmond: bus/bike to Point Pinole park for hiking, birdwatching, or fishing, connect to BART system for San Francisco and other destinations, bus to the Victorian village and beach of Point Richmond
• Berkeley: shop the Fourth Street/San Pablo district or the farmers' markets, walk anywhere, walk to the marina over the new cable footbridge, bus to Tilden Park for hiking with a view or to the U.C. Botanical Garden or Lawrence Hall for more views
• San Francisco: walk/eat/walk anywhere, bus or Caltrain to beach parks in San Mateo or Marin Counties, ferry to Oakland or Marin locations
• Oakland: walk in Jack London Square, Chinatown, and Grand Lake, ferry to Alameda for some easy walking/biking or to San Francisco, bus to parks in the hills
• Oakland Coliseum: walk to a major league football or baseball game, bike to Arrowhead Marsh, connect to BART for other destinations
• Santa Clara: walk to Great America amusement park
• San Jose: visit the quilt, children's, and technology museums, search for real Mexican food, bike or walk to the Rosicrucian Gardens museum and planetarium, connect to buses to Monterey, Santa Cruz, and other towns to the south, connect to Caltrain for Peninsula destinations

NB: Many of these Bay Area stops are also near car-share and car-rental sites. All CC trains can carry quite a few bikes, but the connecting buses are not as accommodating. Making a long trip on this system, for example up to Mount Shasta, can be moderately difficult in terms of planning, as you may have to get into or out of town at an inconvenient time. Walking and biking from a stop is an easy strategy, while connecting via a short Amtrak bus trip or BART ride requires a little more planning.