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Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Amtrak’s “M” Factor: Marcia and Megan
For all I’ve trumpeted about my Amtrak Adventure around the country, I owe a huge thanks and point of credit to two incredible individuals at Amtrak: Marcia Stockstad and Megan Brandell.
As I mentioned in my intro video back at the beginning of the trip, I cashed in 100,000 Amtrak Guest Reward points in order to take the trip. You’d think that after you’d made the decision to drop that many points (almost ten years in the making), everything else would pretty much be gravy. Not quite.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit it: my itinerary was hardly conventional, snaking around the nation, making a zig-zag out of the midwest. The big problem I ran into when I called Amtrak Guest Rewards to book the itinerary was that the computer system just couldn’t handle it. I ended up calling in three times and got three different answers as to why I couldn’t book my trip. All of those answers were pretty shallow excuses (I’ll refrain from recalling them here in public—they were that laughable), so I called Megan Brandell, who I met in the Washington, DC First Class lounge a few weeks earlier, and who coincidentally works for the Guest Rewards office in Washington, DC. I explained the situation to her, and she was nice enough to forward my story on to the Guest Rewards ticketing office in Minneapolis. Megan, thank you for that favor; it saved me more hassle than you can probably imagine.
A few hours later, Marcia Stockstad calls me from the Guest Rewards redemption center in Minneapolis. Now, Marcia and I already knew each other from previous calls I’ve made to her work center. For some reason for like a year, every time I called I’d get Marcia, and we could never figure out why—it was light a weighted roulette wheel. It’s too bad that wheel stopped working when I wanted to actually book the trip, because I wasn’t lucky enough to get her on the phone during the first three tries.
Anyway, it turns out that Marcia is also one of the most knowledgeable people at the ticketing location (something to which I could have already attested, based on past experiences), which is why the job was handed to her, and sure enough, Marcia knocked the reservation out in a matter of minutes—literally. And when I needed to make slight changes to the reservation over the next few months, again, Marcia was there to help without a moment’s hesitation.
I’m positive that if Marcia wasn’t at that center in Minneapolis, getting my trip booked would have been like pulling teeth, so Marcia, thank you.
Amtrak tells me that they are working on improving the Guest Rewards program—let’s hope that they fix the booking system as part of those improvements. In the meantime, let’s just hope that the powers that be keep Marcia and Megan on board; they have management material written all over them.
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Day 15: The Last Train
Well, I’m about 40 minutes from glory, so to speak.
This trip has been absolutely incredible, and if I had one regret, it’s that I couldn’t write more about it along the way. What I wasn’t able to predict was the fact that I couldn’t sit, absorb, take pictures, read, and blog all at the same time. Regretfully, I had to make the decision to prioritize my “absorption time,” at the expense of blogging, and to a lesser extent, picture-taking (although between Jon, Greg, and myself, we all took close to 1,000 pictures, I think). I do, plan however, to do some catch-up blogging this week, though, because I have some real tales from the Coast Starlight to Los Angeles, the Pacific Surfliner, San Diego, the Sunset Limited, Texas Eagle, and New Orleans.
I’m just north of Manassas, Virginia as I post this, and I’ll be detraining at Washington, DC to go to work for the day. This is my last Amtrak train for the trip, although my journey will officially conclude aboard a MARC (Maryland Area Rail Commuter) train this afternoon when I head home to Baltimore.
I’ve completed this entire trip by rail. Long Distance Rail, High Speed Rail, Comuter Rail, and Light Rail. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, either. I’ve met a wider spectrum of people in the last two weeks that I’ve met in the last two years. I’ve seen the landscape transform from east coast cities to prairies to badlands to jagged mountains to volcanoes to vineyards to picturesque beaches to desert to heartland farms to the bayou to kudzu city to the blue ridge mountains, and back to the east coast cities.
In a way, I feel like an eternity has passed since I stepped into that First Class car on the Acela Express back on September 26th. I feel like I’ve lived ten weeks, and not two. At the same time, time has absolutely flown by and the trip’s conclusion has crept up on me quite unexpectedly.
It’s a bittersweet finale to a once in a lifetime trip, but I’m ready to get off of the train. I’m tired, as one might expect, and to be frank, Amtrak obviously didn’t program its dining car menus for a two week long voyage; I’ll be glad to get home and have some variety, that’s for sure.
Again, stay tuned. I have at least two more video entries almost edited and ready to go, and I have a very special thank you that will be posted today for two individuals at Amtrak who made this trip possible.
In the meantime, if you want to ride along musically, I’m listening to Arlo Guthrie’s “Last Train” as I type this. Great song, and it reflects my mood right now.
Rafi
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