Travelers Scramble for Alternatives to Flying

Stranded airline travelers learned the awful truth on Wednesday: You really can’t get there from here, no matter where here is. At least not any time soon.

With U.S. air travel essentially halted for the second straight day, weary tourists and business flyers turned to trains and flocked to buses, clung to rental cars or just hung tight. All were waiting for a shred of normalcy to return after Tuesday’s terrorist attacks.

The fact that many of the world’s commercial planes figure to remain grounded until week’s end just added to a long list of imponderables: How much does it cost to rent a car from Los Angeles to New York? Is curbside check-in extinct? (Answer: Probably.) Can you ever really go home again?

Thelma Bambauer certainly hopes so. Stuck in San Francisco after a reunion with two old friends, she desperately needs to get home to her disabled husband in Tucson. Her pals plan to wait for flights--whenever that might be. Bambauer rented a car and headed southeast, alone.

“It will take a couple of days, but I’ll get [home] before they do,” Bambauer said Wednesday. “There’s no guarantee if I stay I’ll get a plane tomorrow.”

If nothing else, Wednesday’s snarled air traffic proved what a small world it really is. Aftershocks from the hijack attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were felt at the Shanghai airport and the Emeryville Amtrak station, the Las Vegas Greyhound depot and one of Canada’s most remote provinces, at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton and a San Francisco Avis outlet.

Anxiety and distress were the emotions of the hour. Followed closely by homesickness and boredom and sadness and fear. “No more planes for me, ever,” insisted Charlotte Anderson, as she waited at Union Station in Los Angeles for a train to Oakland. From there she planned to drive home--to Sterling, Utah.

Tiny Gander, Newfoundland, population 6,600, nearly doubled in size overnight. An unlikely spot for global terror to resonate, the town suddenly found itself home to 38 grounded aircraft. Some passengers were held on board overnight Tuesday. Residents searched for 6,500 beds. Airline officials wondered whether the small province had enough jet fuel to go around.

At the Emeryville Amtrak station in Northern California’s East Bay, a badly torn Jim DeCaster, 41, opted for a three-day train trip home to Newark, N.J. His was a terrible balancing act.

On the one hand there was his business colleague who “just sort of broke down and said she just refused to fly, so I assured her we were going to take the safest way [home] possible,” he said. On the other was the drive to return home, magnified by worries about a family friend who worked in the World Trade Center. “‘He’s a great guy,” said Kelly. “And I just pray he’s in a hospital somewhere.”

The normally tranquil train station was transformed Wednesday--the sedate book-readers and dozers joined by an airport crowd that paced nervously, talked on cell phones and lined up to make pay phone calls. “Real, real, real busy,” was how one Amtrak worker described it.

Jeff May, 27, said he was in his seat in his plane on the tarmac at San Francisco International Airport at 6:30 a.m. Tuesday trying to get home from a business trip when the pilot announced the unfolding disaster.

“I’m so glad [my] plane didn’t get off the ground,” May said.

“I’ll fly again someday,” he added, “but any time I take a plane anywhere for the rest of my life I’m going to see the image of that plane hitting that tower. I can’t get the image out of my head.”

At the Los Angeles Airport Hilton, stranded strangers compared notes about rental car prices and airline information. Donald Levit and Heather Kim, visiting from Manhattan’s Upper Westside, tried to figure out which was worse, fear of flying or homesickness.

“It’s awful not to be home,” said Levit, who was pondering a five-day drive across country in a rental car costing $83 a day. “We’re lining up a few flights for tomorrow, but we’re scared, so we’re investigating our options.”

Donald Madden, Las Vegas terminal manager for Greyhound, begged the motor coach firm to send him 15 more buses on Wednesday to accommodate the crush of passengers. Business quadrupled Tuesday, rose upward of sixfold on Wednesday.

A line of several hundred would-be riders snaked along the hot sidewalk and into the terminal. It was so stuffy that one man passed out. Elapsed time from hope to ticket: three hours. Limousine drivers peddled pricey trips--$895 to Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix; $1,050 to Reno; $1,455 to San Francisco.

Janelle Montgomery warmed her heels in muggy Las Vegas on Wednesday afternoon, as she struggled to complete a trip from Oklahoma City to a new job, and life, in Seattle. She spent Tuesday night in a motel, hoping to fly to Seattle on Wednesday. No chance. That’s when she hit the Greyhound line for a bus . . . back to Oklahoma.

“I left my Ford Explorer in the long-term parking lot there, and it’s filled with just about everything I own,” she explained. “With everything that’s happened, airport security might be suspicious of a car filled with stuff, sitting there for weeks. So I’m going to go back and get it and drive to Seattle.”

The National Business Travel Assn. estimated that at least 30,000 U.S. business and leisure travelers were stranded overseas--in addition to the hundreds of thousands wishing they were homeward bound in the United States. Marianne McInerney, the group’s executive director, was in the latter category.

McInerney had intended to fly from Washington, D.C. to the West Coast on Tuesday but made it only as far as Chicago. Grounded, she rented a car and drove 13 hours back to the capital, in what turned out to be a sort of caravan.

She said travelers who rented cars in Chicago formed a “cocoon of protection,” as they made their way back to the East Coast, sharing cell phones, driving in tandem and visiting at rest centers along the way.

“When the rental cars ran out, I saw people in U-Hauls. There were a couple of stretch limousines that kept traveling in and out of our circle. There was one group that had chartered a bus,” she said. “I think people did not want to be alone.”

Back in California at the Burbank Hilton, Dennis Benson, 49, figured the only way he was going to get home to Mokena, a small town outside Chicago, was to drive his rental car. Though he and his wife, Pat, have tickets out of LAX for Friday, he wasn’t optimistic.

“I’m just going to hang on to the car I’ve got. It’s the only way back,” he said.

His wife, he said, was “not real good about this trip.” On Sunday, they had been standing in line at Universal Studios for The Terminator ride when the 4.2 earthquake hit.

“It’s gone from bad to worse,” he said, “and we’re 3,000 miles from home.”

Still, for many of those stranded Wednesday, fear and frustration were tempered with one large dose of gratitude. All anyone had to do was turn on a news broadcast or pick up a newspaper to find a reason to thank God.

When Alba Escobar’s flight out of LAX was canceled Tuesday morning, she was left stranded and without money.

On Wednesday evening, she planned to head for a Red Cross shelter and hope her flight would leave some time today. Waiting in the sun outside the airport’s main entrance, Escobar said: “It has been really frustrating, but at least we are alive.”

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Times staff writers Tom Gorman, Bonnie Harris, Jean Merl, Jocelyn Stewart, and Kurt Streeter contributed to this story along with Times special correspondent Lionel Perron in Toronto.