Day Four--A Return to Amtrak, a Journey to Portland

I slept great on the train the second time around.  Allie, however, did not.  She tossed and turned, and because I had let her have the window seat this time since I had it on the first train ride, she found herself blocked in and unable to reach the overhead compartments or restroom because I was sleeping like a log.  I felt bad about all of this in the morning.  I thought I was being generous by not hogging the window seat on both rides.

The train ride to Portland was fairly uneventful.  Allie and I were mostly hung out the sightseeing car (again).  Allie colored more pages in her Hello Kitty coloring book, and I read A LOT of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen.  Having read most of the usual Jane Austen novels--Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion--I thought I should try a new one.  My overall reaction was "meh."  It's not a new favorite, but it wasn't an unpleasant read.  It was much more moralistic than some of the others I've read, and the main character was perfect, with none of the fire or spark of Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet.  She was soft spoken and never gave any trouble to anybody.  In fact, she didn't do much at all.  Which meant the book was mostly watching the side characters destroy their lives with their own shallowness and lack of morals.  Instructive, not really entertaining.

I got a good picture of the conductor, cap and all.  

Other highlights of the train ride included talking to a German engineering student, teaching Allie to play ERS, and eating a lot of Japanese snacks and candy.

Allie and I when we realized that this sightseeing car didn't have outlets at every table, like the one to San Francisco had.  This meant we couldn't start drafting our blogs and condemned me to several more hours of Mansfield Park.

But the most wondrous and magical part of this train ride was the scenery.  The train climbed through snowbound forests and foggy lakes and canyons so steep you were afraid to stand on that side of the train.  Sometimes you could see for miles, sometimes the trees towered over the train.  Sometimes the white of an icy mountain lake would stretch into the distance, sometimes the valleys were so full of fog and mist you could barely see the drop off next to the tracks.

There's a huge lake in that fog.  It kept disappearing behind trees, and this was the best shot I could get.

Trees towering over the double-decker train.  

As we left the mountains behind, the snow receded, and it was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and the world becomes full of color.  The black and white and grey scenery of snow and trees and mist was replaced with green and brown forests, blue lakes, and green grass.  Eventually our path was paralleling the Columbia River, and that is an impressive sight all on its own.

When we pulled into the Portland Union Station that afternoon around three, we were surprised.  By this time, after 34 hours of train rides from Salt Lake City to San Francisco to Portland, Allie and I were becoming connoisseurs of train stations.  Allie would glance out the window and delcare, "That is not a train station," if a station didn't come up to snuff.  Her response when we saw Portland? "Now that's a train station." And boy howdy was it ever.  Tall ceilings, stone walls, graceful wooden benches. It made many of the other stations we'd been to look like lean-to's in back alleys.

In Portland we would be staying with Angie, who was one of my close friends growing up, and her husband, Shane, who is also from my hometown and went to my high school.  They've been together since their sophomore year.  Isn't that crazy and awesome?  I hadn't seen them since their wedding 3 1/2 years ago, so I was excited to catch up.  Angie had class (she's going to be an elementary school teacher), so Shane picked us up from the station.  He needed to do some homework himself, so he kindly offered to take our stuff to their apartment and then dropped us off at a place where we could lose ourselves in wonder until Angie got done with class:  Powell's Books.

Powell's Books is a gigantic book store, with tall shelves, maze-like rooms, and books new, used, and rare.  It has an in-house coffee shop, of course. (I thought it was interesting that they had shelves of books for sale inside the coffee shop.  Their choice of genres was also interesting.  The books in the coffee shop?  Romance and Graphic Novel.)  I've wanted to go to Powell's Books ever since Di went there years ago and bought me a philosophy themed water bottle.  Allie and I wandered around the store for close to three hours.

It took me forever to even decide what kind of book I wanted to buy. (Of course I was going to buy something!) There were thousands of interesting-looking books.  How could I walk away with one?  How could I pick?  Finally, after I started to feel very, very dazed and lost (The fact that spending 17 hours on a train had left me feeling like the ground was moving wasn't helping the daze.), I came to the conclusion.  I thought about things I had always wanted to know more about, not just things I wanted to seem to be into, or wanted to like, but things I actually had always wished I knew more about, and then I wandered up a few more floors.  There, in the nonfiction books, in the India (modern history) subsection, I sat down to examine the books on Gandhi.  I walked out with his autobiography and one other, much slimmer volume of some of his spiritual writings.  I bought them used, and got both for less than $15.    I'm half way through the autobiography now, and I'm not regretting that $15 or the books I left behind at all.

While we were there I ducked into the bathroom on one of the floors.  The toilet seat cover was covered with unusually inoffensive graffiti, but my favorite part by far was this:

It's a Doctor Who quote!!!!  In a bathroom!! And I recognized it just by the initials and the quote, which was not a catch phrase or a motto, just a quote from that one episode in season four that one time.  

After Allie and I met back up in the maze of shelves, we decided it would probably be best for our health to get outside and away from the books a bit.  Besides, this was a good chance to explore downtown Portland. So we set out for adventure in the setting sun.  On our adventure we found this elephant statue.

I don't know why I felt the need to be an awkward karate kid in this picture.  I just did.

Then we found the Chinese garden, which we had been thinking about paying for later, but I think we saw most of it from their windows.  We even got good pictures.  Portland's small Chinatown was lined with red lanterns and blooming Magnolia trees, which is an enchanting combination.

Who needs to pay to get in when you can get this view through the window?

When Angie got out of class she came to pick us up, and we drove to her and Shane's place to meet the cats and pick up Shane for dinner.  We went to a place called East Burn, which was good, and rather quirky.  There were things like Rabbit Schnitzel and Elk Meatloaf.  We had to have Shane, who graduated from a very nice culinary arts school, explain several words on the menu.  But the food was delicious, even if I couldn't pronounce the name of the cheese or the bread in the sandwich I ate.  Because it was Wednesday, and it is apparently a Wednesday tradition at the East Burn, a projector screen was set up and they started showing Dial M for Murder.  That was cool, except for the fact that they didn't turn the sound on.

After dinner we stayed up way to late reminiscing about the good old days (poor Allie).  Angie, taterbugs, and I used to be nearly inseparable partners in adventure.  So Angie and I spent time looking at old photos she had, reading poems the three of us had written together in high school, and even old notes she'd saved.  Angie is still one of the coolest, most talented, smartest, and most awesome people I know.

After a long day, Allie and I sacked out on Angie and Shane's couch and floor, but not before one of her cats (Doctor McGillikitty) had managed to chew apart the bungee cord on Allie's duffel bag, thereby revealing the personality we would later become quite familiar with.  But more on that when I write about Day Five--Crazy Cats and Green, Green, GREEN!