So how did people find travel to and from the con?

[MonkeySloth]

 

It's too bad our modern lives limit train travel, even if it's not the absolute cheapest form of travel. Because a train car full of forumites heading to Reapercon would be just as fun as the con itself was.

Seriously. The east coast caravan, done as a train car, would be awesome.

 

 

I would seriously consider flying to the East coast to do that--if we could get a car with the tables to work on.

Edited April 30, 2014 by MonkeySloth

[Heisler]

I have flown and driven from Denver. We have two viable driving routes and usually takes about 11-12 hours. Well, I routinely did it in 10 hours. I prefer to fly at this point as I would rather spend my time on site rather than traveling.

 

I have flown a lot of airlines in the last 10 months, but I have gradually come around to preferring to fly Southwest. One checked bag is always free. They don't have a first class section since they use open seating. But you can do things to make sure you are in the A group (I'm always in the A group), which means you will have a lot of seating options available to you.

 

The huge disadvantage with flying Southwest to Dallas is that you will arrive at Love Field instead of DFW. Its quite a bit further away.

 

I was looking at train times using Amtrak. Basically you can't get to Dallas from Denver on the train. It looked like Chicago to Dallas was like 21 hours though. I'm guessing I inputted something wrong.

[Last Knight]

I dunno, Heisler, looks about the same for me. I'd have to go to Chicago (17 hours), transfer, then go to Dallas (21 hours). About $300 for the value option, up to 6 for the deluxe (which gets me a bed).

 

Doesn't really look doable, sadly.

 

Also, can't reserve a ticket more than 11 months prior.

[Doug Sundseth]

The US train system is optimized for cargo, especially non-time-critical cargo. (It turns out that this is similar to optimizing network traffic for bursty transmissions like files and email rather than optimizing for continuous traffic like video.)

 

The result is that we ship a far higher percentage of bulk cargo and a far lower percentage of passengers by rail than Europeans do.

 

Given the disparate population densities, that makes sense to me.

[Pingo]

I like driving, but I find it very fatiguing. On long trips my husband and I trade driving, usually twice a day, and it generally takes at least two days with a hotel stop in the night to get from our place to family on the east coast.

 

Last summer we had to get out there fast so eldest could visit colleges in the brief time we had between the kids' summer schedules and school starting. We didn't have the luxury of four days' travel time, so we took the train.

 

Maybe it was more expensive than a car rental would have been, but it was a darn sight faster, with food and beds included.

 

When airplane travel has so many delays, lines, scary inspections, the potential for turbulence far worse than relatively smooth train travel and a guaranteed low-oxygen low-humidity environment for hours at a time (for those of us with constitutions of 4), then train travel looks positively luxurious and not taking all that much more time overall.

 

Unfortunately it only works when the terminals are conveniently located.

 

I could drive to ReaperCon, but I would be very worried about fatigue. I think for practicality if I were going I would need to take a train to Dallas (what was the other possibility again?) and rent a car, take a cab, or take public transportation to Denton from there.

[Dilvish the Deliverer]

I flew out of Bradley International in Hartford.  One the way out I transferred in North Carolina and in Philly on the way back.  I went with US Air as that is carrier I use for work and I like to keep all of my air mile points together.  Prices were ok, under $400 round trip IIRC.  If I had booked earlier it would have been cheaper.  I over packed (all of my paints and so forth) but luckily for me US Air waives the fee for the first two bags checked for active duty military.

 

At DFW I teamed up with Monkeysloth and hitched a ride with him.  He asked for a sedan but evidently a sedan in Texas is actually a Frontier.  Go figure.  After picking up Cash at the hotel we went to the Meet and Greet and had a nice tour of several subdivisions.  All of the houses were brick and there was at least one truck in each driveway.

 

On the way home, I was fortunate enough to catch a ride back to the airport.

[MonkeySloth]

@Pingo have you thought of traveling by sub?  Dilvish might be able to help with that.

[Last Knight]

@Pingo have you thought of traveling by sub?  Dilvish might be able to help with that.

Definitely not low humidity!

[klarg1]

 

 

It's too bad our modern lives limit train travel, even if it's not the absolute cheapest form of travel. Because a train car full of forumites heading to Reapercon would be just as fun as the con itself was.

Seriously. The east coast caravan, done as a train car, would be awesome.

 

 

I would seriously consider flying to the East coast to do that--if we could get a car with the tables to work on.

 

 

I briefly considered flying south to join up with the Southeast caravan by car, but it would still have required an extra day's travel.

 

Rail travel in the U.S. is pretty useless outside of a few high-traffic areas. (I live at the northern extreme of one of those areas.) I have used rail travel in Europe to travel meaningful distances, and I quite like it.

 

Thanks to work and convention travel, I have become a moderately experienced air traveler at this point. You get used to the annoyances. I am, to be frank, far more familiar with SFO, ORD and BOS than I really want to be. I'm starting to learn the ins and outs of DFW too. Of course, none of those compare to the misery that is LHR.

[Mr Melons]

An East Coast train caravan sounds like it would be straight out of Harry Potter...

[MissMelons]

An East Coast train caravan sounds like it would be straight out of Harry Potter...

 

Could you imagine the painting club on a train.....cross country....sounds amazing.

[Mr Melons]

Would you even say it sounds........magical?

[MissMelons]

It'd get my wheels goin.

[Last Knight]

[Mr Melons]

She doesn't actually have wheels LK...you don't have to log that in your spreadsheet.