A freeway-free coastal journey

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA freeways make my mother hyperventilate. So when Santa Barbara assembled a package of discounts for visitors arriving by train, it seemed the perfect outing for Mom’s annual visit from Ohio.

Train travel occupies a sweet spot between let’s-jump-in-the-car spontaneity and the toiletries-in-a-Ziploc hassle that now accompanies flying. Anyone can board a train and a conductor will sell you a ticket. To get the Santa Barbara Car Free 20% discount, though, I had to reserve my tickets three days ahead, which was easy. I had started planning a month before Mom arrived, trying to get a weekend hotel room just as students were returning to UC Santa Barbara in September.

The Car Free program also offered rate reductions up to 20% at 18 hotels in the city, from modest motels to the upscale Fess Parker’s DoubleTree Resort. After weeding out the lodgings that limited the deal to weekdays, I quizzed front-desk clerks on locations and chose a hotel close to the beach and three blocks from the station.

I’m a long-standing fan of Amtrak’s 325-mile Pacific Surfliner line, which runs from San Diego to San Luis Obispo, but my only experience was riding it south from Los Angeles. The journey from downtown’s Union Station to Santa Barbara takes just over 2 1/2 hours, and though a person might argue that one can drive there faster, I would question whether that person had driven the 101 Freeway on a Friday afternoon.

I’ve been told that the segment north of Santa Barbara, where the Pacific Surfliner traces the coastline around Point Conception and along the edge of Vandenberg Air Force Base, is its most spectacular stretch. But I was gripped by the view of the mostly industrial backyard of Los Angeles. The train passed downtown’s corrugated warehouses of recyclables, turned along the Los Angeles River, then cut diagonally across the San Fernando Valley. In North Hollywood, we glided past ironworks and stonecutters, fenced forests of fake movie-studio trees and a giant auto junkyard.

Beyond the Chatsworth tunnel and the cracked-boulder landscape of Simi Valley, I closed my eyes and napped, which I surely could not have done on the freeway.

The next thing I knew, we were in the coastal plains of Camarillo and Oxnard, strawberry fields forever.

When we disembarked in Santa Barbara, the light was pink-orange from the smoke of the massive Day fire, which was still burning in the hills of Ventura County. I tossed my gym bag over my shoulder, Mom pulled her wheeled suiter behind her, and we were in the lobby of the Hotel Oceana quicker than we’d have found a taxi stand at LAX.

We weren’t the only people with the train-getaway idea. Four groups from our train were also checking in. Behind me, I heard a woman whisper, “Tell them we took the train.”

The clerk, however, was unfamiliar with the discount program, which caused some delay checking in (and again at check-out). The hotel’s reservation service also hadn’t indicated my need for a room with two queen beds.

Hotel Oceana has 122 rooms in multiple buildings. Some are small hotels, others converted apartment buildings. The result is a spread-out campus effect, and we walked most of it with a bellman looking for a room that might suffice. After we toured the property, there suddenly were two double rooms available -- already empty and cleaned -- because some guest “wasn’t coming back.”

Mom and I took the edge off our ire -- OK, mostly my ire -- with cocktails at the Santa Barbara FisHouse, a short walk east on Cabrillo Boulevard. Then I was able to enjoy catching up with Mom, at the same time enjoying the Prawn-Ton appetizer (prawns rolled in wonton wrappers), a salad, cioppino (fish stew), and creme brulee. The restaurant, which looked low-slung from the street, had church-like beams inside that reached from the vaulted ceiling to the floor, framing the beach-facing windows. I was sorry we’d missed sunset.

Free breakfast goes fast

THE next morning, the breeze had shifted, and the sky was cloudless. Outside our picture window -- our room had clearly been the living room of a beach-close apartment -- was a lovely pool with rolled towels waiting on every chaise. Several striped cabanas offered shade. Though the day would get warm, it was too brisk for the pool in the morning, and we headed to the cozy room where the Hotel Oceana served its free continental breakfast. But we didn’t stay. By 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, there wasn’t a crust of toast to be had.

Lucky for us, the Oceana buildings surround Sambo’s, the only remaining outlet of a once-massive diner chain from the ‘60s and ‘70s. We took available seats at the counter and shortly found before us more eggs and flapjacks than we could possibly eat.

The Downtown-Waterfront shuttle was crowded as we headed up State Street, the main drag, but the short trip and 25-cent fare underscored how easy Santa Barbara is to get around without a car. The next day we pushed our luck, and tried to get to Montecito. The bus we wanted didn’t run on Sundays, and we had a hairy walk under the 101 Freeway to get into the village. But we got back by another route with little trouble.

Santa Barbara Car Free may be the first tourism promotion created by a government pollution-control agency.

It’s a cooperative project overseen by the Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control District, which started as “Take a Vacation From Your Car” about three years ago. Besides train and hotel discounts, it has arranged partnerships with tourist-geared businesses, including sedan winery tours, though that seemed to violate the car-free ethos to me. But there were plenty of other ways to see Santa Barbara -- by sailboat, by kayak, by bicycle.

We chose Segway.

At Segway of Santa Barbara, a garage in the warehouse area near the waterfront, Mom and I strapped on helmets and stepped aboard. Sensors in the Segway platform sense where your center of gravity is. If it’s forward, the Segway rolls forward. Shift your weight to your heels, and you’ll go backward. Squat, and the contraption comes to a sudden stop. Steering is controlled by a twist of the left handgrip.

My mother has many talents, but driving a Segway did not come naturally.

Trish, one of the owners, let a 30-minute lesson stretch beyond an hour as Mom continued to plow over mini traffic cones. But once we were out on the bike path, which wends its way east along the south-facing beach, Mom could stop thinking so hard and just ride.

We joined pedestrians by the score, and bikers by the dozens. Families in pedal-powered surreys worked their way down the parallel street, as did girls in undersized Fun Cars equipped with GPS-guided audio tours.

By the time we rolled our Segways back into the garage, we were exhausted. Including the hours of browsing the shops of State Street, we’d been on our feet for six hours straight. We stopped at Eladio’s for a glass of wine and appetizers, then fell onto our two beds for more than an hour, barely able to wake ourselves for dinner.

We went back to Eladio’s -- it was close and our feet still hurt. Out on the patio, we recovered over salad and crab cakes.

On the train back Sunday afternoon, I did the math -- because even with gas prices hovering around $3 a gallon, it’s often hard to make the economics of not-driving work. Our two Amtrak tickets cost $64, round-trip. That’s maybe $36 more than I would have spent on gas, but I also saved $42 on the hotel and didn’t pay $18 for two nights’ parking. And Mom didn’t once, not even on the Segway, hyperventilate.

robin.rauzi@latimes.com

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All aboard

GETTING THERE:

From Union Station in Los Angeles, the Pacific Surfliner train has five daily departures to Santa Barbara at 7:30 a.m., 9:05 a.m., and 12:30, 2:55 and 7 p.m. Also, Amtrak buses run at 9:05 or 9:20 p.m. All have earlier stops in Orange and San Diego counties and subsequent stops in the Valley and Ventura County. See www.amtrak.com for full schedule.

Discounted tickets must be purchased three days in advance but are valid for travel for six months (except for blackout dates around the holiday weekends). Use promotion code H636 during purchase at tickets.amtrak.com.

GETTING AROUND:

Bicycles are welcome on Amtrak trains. Train cars with racks have a bike symbol next to the door. In Santa Barbara, bikes, tandems and pedal-driven surreys are available from Wheel Fun Rentals, 23 E. Cabrillo Blvd.; (805) 966-2282, www.wheelfunrentals.com. The Car Free discount is 30%. High-end touring cycles are available ($55 a day, two-day minimum, no discount) from Open Air Bicycles, 224 Chapala St., behind the Santa Barbara station; (805) 962-7000.

Buses: The Downtown-Waterfront shuttle runs north on State Street from the pier. The Seaside Shuttle runs along Cabrillo Boulevard from the marina to the zoo. Either costs 25 cents. The Metropolitan Transit District’s 22 line connects downtown to the Mission, Natural History Museum and Botanical Gardens. Fares are $1.25. Complete bus schedules at www.sbmtd.gov.

Segway of Santa Barbara, 24 1/2 E. Mason St.; (805) 963-7672, www.segwayofsb.com. We did the sunset special, which was $119 for two people for two hours. Rental is regularly $40 an hour. The discount is 20% off hourly rentals and 10% off special tours.

Fun Cars, mopeds and electric jeeps, some with GPS-triggered audio tours, can be rented at another outlet of Wheel Fun Rentals, 101 State St.; (805) 962-2585, www.wheelfunrentals.com.

WHERE TO STAY:

There are 18 hotels in Santa Barbara that offer varying discounts through the Car Free program. I stayed at Hotel Oceana, 202 W. Cabrillo Blvd.; (800) 965-9776, www.hoteloceana.com. Our room was $210 before the discount. Hotel Santa Barbara, 53 State St.; (888) 259-7700, www.hotelsantabarbara.com, is a bit farther from the train station, but is closer to the heart of downtown.

TO LEARN MORE:

Santa Barbara Car Free, P.O. Box 60436, Santa Barbara, CA 93160; (805) 696-1100, www.santabarbaracarfree.org. For current lists of the available discounts, click on “news and promotions.” The Amtrak discount is good through Dec. 13, 2007, but participants and discounts may change for 2007.

-- Robin Rauzi