Grand Canyon Railway experience; Williams, Arizona

The Grand Canyon Railway experience is essentially a two-hour train ride from Williams, Arizona to the Grand Canyon… if you return the same day (another two hours) you will have gotten to stay there for about three hours (so a taste). OR — if you are the hiking type, you can opt to stay at a hotel at the Canyon and return a different day. The “experience” includes a cute little show before the ride, and then some entertainment while on the train, and concludes with a “faux” train robbery on the way back. All in all, when you add up the prices, IF you’re doing route 66 and just want to pop over to the Grand Canyon, to see it… this actually works out to be a pretty good deal money wise.

The CHEAPEST ticket, which is what I got, was $62.86. This was for the Pullman car, their most historic car (No air-conditioning) and did not include the park entrance fee (as I have been buying the National Park’s yearly pass since I first started traveling… I have yet to not get my money’s worth — when you buy the ticket you tell you have it, when you pick up the tickets you show them the pass and they write down its ID number to submit to the park officials). IF you consider the cost of gas (maybe 3 hours there and back — the train does it slower), wear and tear on your car, finding parking, etc etc…. and the fact that the train includes live entertainment … I think it’s worth it to do it once.

A lot of the people who do this opted to stay at their hotel as well, but this is not necessary and not what I did. (There is a Harvey House at that location, but its not where you’ll be staying… and you don’t have to stay at the hotel to see it. Essentially, its been replaced by a fairly generic building that looks like pretty much every other 3 star hotel along our highways)… I stayed at the Howard Johnson located about 2 blocks north, for substantially less money. (That said the hotel is OK, but the owners … an Indian couple… just don’t get it. The rooms are clean and comfortable, the WiFi was BLAZING fast… but the security is suspiciously lax. IF You go to this hotel make sure you check in early enough that you can change rooms if you need to. The hotel has no elevators, and they won’t help you with your bags if you have mobility issues like I do. The room I ultimately got did NOT have a chain on the door, or any sort of way for me to keep hotel staff out while I was sleeping. By the time I realized this — after dinner — it was too late to change rooms. The next day the woman who works for them — MUCH better at customer service than they are — and I looked for a suitable room, and we had to go through THREE before we found one with a working chain.)

So… I checked the weather report for the next day at the Grand Canyon the night I arrived, and it said rain… eek… then checked again the day of, this time specifying the South Rim (which is where the train goes) and it said no rain… phew!! NOTE: It’s important to remember the Grand Canyon is a VERY big place, so when checking the weather, be specific for which part.

With the Train Ride, come a whole package of entertainments. The first happens BEFORE the ride and is cute… I THINK the whole point of it is actually a ploy to make sure customers are on site and ready to go a good 45 minutes before the train leaves… but still…it adds to the ‘ambiance’

Looking around at the audience, I at first thought there may be one person in this whole crowd under the age of 40, But then I took that back … I just spotted a baby. That said, it was late September and most kids were in school, so the crowd consisted mostly of retirees who prefer to come to places like this when they are LESS crowded. It’s a cute show, funny even, more than a few good laughs. You can tell the actors have done this may be 1000 times but they’re not phoning it in

After seeing the show myself, and many days later… I watched this video and I guess the attitude of the organizers is, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” because in spite of the fact that I saw the show almost six years after this YouTube video was posted — this is almost word for word the same show I saw, just with different actors.

The actors do a bit of improve around what the audience does or does not do, and the audience member roped into the skit, but otherwise, I saw the exact same show. (They even found a guy wearing shorts who had a bag… albeit this bag was backpack)

And after the show, that’s when you’re led by the actors to the train, and you line up by the car you’re assigned to…

And this is where things got wonky. So the deal is this…. APPARENTLY if you sign up for the Pullman (which is the most affordable ticket) they tell you to show up at 8:30 like everybody else, for what you think will be a 9:15 departure… but you won’t actually Leave until 10:00. IF they get a lot of people showing up, they’re going to break it up into two trains (according to the manager this is on behest of the park which doesn’t want a boat load of people showing up at once. He said they could easily put everyone on one train). Everybody who bought a ticket on the expensive cars — the ones with the observation bubbles on top of the train for better viewing…. and the MOST expensive cars which are old-fashioned luxury (but with air-conditioning), have a buffet and dedicated performers who are there just for you — THOSE trains… they’ll leave on time … Those of us with tickets that have air-conditioning but no bubble up top, or those like me who purchased a Pullman car with no air-con…. they’ll leave you standing around and waiting for the second train (and there was NOTHING on my tickets denoting that).

GRRRRRR……

You do however get the same amount of time at the park because your return train also leaves later. That said, once we were on the train, it was actually very pleasant… first a guy comes on, and makes sure you understand all the thing you need to know

Then we were introduced to our carriage’s aid, the girl in the blue and white outfit, and the photographer (the guy in the red shirt with the massive camera, whose job it is to wander between carriages taking photos on first leg of the trip, and then he tries to sell you your photos on our return one).

While the downsides of being in the cheap Pullman car is that it goes last (leaving the station) and has no air-conditioning, the upsides are that one, it’s always placed directly adjacent to the dining car (they told me this when I was booking the trip)

Although this also means everyone in the cars behind us has to pass through us to get to said dining car… for their drinks, snacks and ice-cream

The other benefit… and this is the more important one I think… is that sitting in an old-fashioned Pullman with no aircon traveling through almost wild country it’s really easy to almost feel like you’ve drifted back in time to when train, horse or foot were your only options for getting out west … a mental fantasy that the more modern trains don’t really support.

On the way to the Canyon we were serenaded by this young musician, who wasn’t bad

And then on the way back (when we were all really pooped) we were played at by this guy

Who was trying just a bit too hard to get us to be clapping our hand and tapping our feet, when all we really wanted to do was rest…

Towards the end of the ride to the Canyon we passed an area that had clearly had a forest fire, which made me wonder how it’d happened and if it were the fault of the train, or the people on it.

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And then right as we were approaching the park, our carriage’s aide (the gal in the blue and white outfit) began to tell us things like, that the red ponderosa pines that grown in the park have a scent. If you smell vanilla, than the tree is a female but if you smell butterscotch, the tree is male. (I never managed to get close enough to one to test it) That, and there’s a $500 fine for feeding the animals … even if it’s a squirrel who stole it from you .. and that we should all beware because they WILL steal your food if you let them.

And then we got to the park….

(I’m talking about the Park in a separate blog post, click here to see it)

And THIS is what you get to avoid by taking the train

That said, the ride back was also very pretty,

and the rain that the first weather report I had looked at promised, could be seen approaching us in the distance

But it included rainbows, which made me happy….

(and in fact greeted us as with a very light rain just as we arrived back in Williams, which got more intense later in the evening).

Towards the very end of the ride, we had a last bit of excitement… there’s a train heist… it’s actually kind of cute

(My video this time… Note how the train obligingly stops for the 2 riders )

But somehow, even though there were TWO riders attacking the train, and TWO gunmen stealing from us… somehow one of them managed to be in two places at the same time (note: two horses carrying two gunmen, two gunmen stealing from us… yet one left over to take care of the horses… this happened how?)

And then you’re ever so politely robbed. (They threaten to take your stuff, but never do.) We were instructed (by our conductor lady in the blue outfit) that if we wanted to we were supposed to take any money we wanted them to actually rob, and fold it and hold it out for them to take, which a few of the customers did… tips in other-words.

And then a little later (after the thieves have had time to get all the way to the back of the train, where apparently the guy who plays the sheriff was waiting to arrest them (it’s a shame that only THAT car gets to see the arrest) he waltzes them back through the train to the front, and we all get to laugh about how law and order triumphs.

Before I got someone to take our photo, the guy with the long white hair, who plays the sheriff, turns out he’s actually Dutch, has spent some time living in Japan, and speaks 9 languages at least a enough to get by… I didn’t get around to finding out how it ended up here doing this.

One thing to beware of… on the train, while you’re close to town WiFi is pretty decent, and from time to time it’ll pop back up…. but at the park and for most of the ride you can forget about connectivity. As such, save your battery and just put you phone on airplane mode to save the battery. This is especially true at the Park… Even though there is signal, you just can’t connect to it because TOO many people are also trying.

Williams Arizona vs Kingman: THIS is a very cute little town that’s worth a few days, while Kingman is NOT.

After having stayed a few nights in each, I decided that the town of Williams, Arizona is so upscale compared to Kingman, AZ, that it’s almost like a different world. Where everyone in Kingman seemed to hate their jobs and took it out on the customers, here in Williams I received nothing but decent customer service, i.e., at least they were trying to be nice to you while screwing up their jobs. Where in Kingman you’d be hard pressed to find a decent meal, Williams has more than a few chef driven restaurants. Both cities serve the SAME tourism group (both are on 66, both are gateways to different parts of the Grand Canyon, and Kingman is also an access point to Hoover dam) but each has completely different attention to details and attitudes towards their customers. Therefore, for a restful vacation, choose Williams.

I have a theory as to why this is so …Kingman is down in the desert where its hot and dry and that makes people cranky… while Williams sits at a higher elevation and they’re surrounded by trees. While williams, like a lot of the Route 66 cities, puts a great deal of effort into celebrating its history in that regard, unlike Kingman and some of the other cities in Arizona, there’s something a lot more classy about how they opt to go about it…

This historic gas-station, rather than demolished has been converted into gift shop, and the contents of the shop weren’t just the usual low-cost mugs and magnets (although some of that was there too) but rather it also had goods aimed at much more affluent clientele; some of it even appeared to be from local artists, and it included things like potted cactuses in cute western style pots. After a quick investigation of the store, I headed to my hotel.

I stayed two night here, spending the full day on a train ride to and from the Grand Canyon (totally worth the extra expense, see the post, and allows you to spend about 3 hours exploring the Canyon, which is enough to see the sites and have a meal).

Rather than stay at the train station’s hotel that was built in replacement for the town’s Harvey House (there’s really nothing in this new building of the old grandeur; the original building is still there, but now it’s their gift shop & offices), I opted instead to stay at the Howard Johnson that is only one block away from there (and two blocks from Williams’ downtown area). I was really happy to discover that the WiFi at the hotel was quite reasonable… 4 Mbps download and about 1 upload… which almost made me wish I’d booked for an extra day to spend blogging about my day at the grand Canyon before heading on. That said, it was fast enough that I was able to upload video to YouTube at a decent rate… and rather than picking up WiFi that’s coming through walls from somewhere else in the building, like at most big chain hotels, this place had a server in each room! At this hotel your wifi is your wifi, that speed isn’t shared. That said, all was not perfect. The chain that should have been on the interior of the door in order to lock hotel staff out while I was in, was broken … AND there was no card of the sort you hang on the door to tell the staff not to clean the room in your absence.

The night I arrived I walked around the downtown a little (my right pinky toe had been sprained when I fell off a bed back in Los Angeles, and I’d not gone to a clinic to have it seen to, so walking was a bit painful). For dinner I opted for the Red Raven Restaurant which had VERY good reviews on Yelp, and was suggested for the best option if what you did NOT want was a steak dinner. NONE of the steak places in this town served Bison (the low fat & tastier option) along with Beef, so I was very sad. For dinner I had Salmon Cilantro (Char broiled salmon fillet topped with a cilantro pesto. Served on a bed of Southwest mashed potatoes with grilled asparagus, and for my soup I opted for the Tomato Gazpacho (cold) $22. Both of these were as good as they looked. I forget exactly what the desert was, but it was deeply chocolate and a little bit of heaven in my mouth

After I walked around the downtown some more. The place is LOADED with really high-end shops selling Native American Jewelry, art, clothes, etc. NOTHING in this town is cheap, but the quality is all very high end.

After dinner I headed back to my hotel to rest up for the next day. The Train I was going to be taking required I be at the station at 8:30 am, while I normally wake up at around 10. (For dinner of the day after the train ride, I opted for McD’s all day breakfast menu, and an Egg McMuffin — I love those things). The day AFTER the train ride, I checked out the town a little bit more while heading east to my next stay.

A 2nd renovated historic gas station. The museum was closed when I arrived.

Got a love it, instead of having wooden Indians (which are offensive) they have wooden white people and bears… which the woman working inside told me represented the animal spirits of the tribespeople… like I said, classy

I admit, I didn’t come here to eat while I was in town because they didn’t have a single thing on the menu that I could eat and keep my diet … Everything was either beef or something fried… that said, EVERYONE of my friends who has been to Williams told me that if you do want a steak this is the place to go… one friend even said it was the best steak she’d ever had in her entire life.

66 as it runs through downtown Williams is a one way street, so if you can see their sign from the vantage the lower picture, you are in fact driving the wrong way. (Got to love their sense of humor)

Russell’s Travel Center, Glenrio, NM

Most Travel Center’s along highways are a dime a dozen, but every once in a while you see one worthy of notice, such is the case for Russell’s Travel Center in Glenrio, New Mexico located on I-40/Route 66The center is located in the middle of not much,

this travel center seems to be pretty all-inclusiveThere’s a restaurant, a subway subs, and a grocery store that sells a large selection of pre-made foods, and other tasties

I was at the truck stop at around 11am and the donuts were sold out. When I mentioned it to the manager, he said they only make a limited amount every morning, and when they sell out they’re gone.

Where most truck stops will sell a small selection of foods, this place was practically a grocery store of foods that store easily and don’t require refrigeration or freezing.

Another thing that impressed me was this place stocks its shelves with a LOT of single serving options. This is actually unusual and I know this because I’m always in search of these things. Most stores for instance only sell soup or chili cans that serve two or more servings …

Now if your someone who lives on the move like I do, or a trucker does, this means either you end up eating twice as much and get fat, or your stuck with eating one serving and trying to store the other serving, which means you have to eat the same thing multiple times a day.

They have the normal distribution of services for truckers, and it was nice that they were making the sports equipment available to non-truckers, but that said, $12 for a shower seems a bit pricy to me… but this is the desert.