You Don't Have To Go That Far

Mount Hood from the train

.I'm already having trouble finding time to blog.  I find that it's pretty easy to find more interesting things to do, especially when I'm in Portland.  I had a wonderful 10 day visit with the 3/4th of my kids that live in Portland.  I took the Amtrak Empire Builder from Chicago to Portland and it was a new experience for me.  One of the things I was looking most forward to was the trip the train takes through Glacier National Park.  I have never been there and I expected the train's route through the park to be amazing, which it may well be.  I can't report on that because we went through the park in the middle of the night.  It seems a bit strange to me that Amtrak doesn't schedule the trip to go through the park in daylight.  I did get to meet and visit with several fellow passengers and that ended up being the highlight of the train trip.

We didn't do anything touristy in Portland, just visited and ate...a lot.  The weather was outstanding for most of my visit, highs in the 90s and lots of sunshine.  Last week it got more cloudy and rainy for a few days but it was sunny and beautiful again before I left.  One thing that is a great comfort to me, every time I visit, is all of the kids have great friends in Portland. I have had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with many of their friends and they are a really great bunch of people.  It was probably good practice for me to spend some time with a bunch of cool young adults, as that demographic will make up a large portion of my fellow sailing trainees.  I did learn that, including me, there will be 26 people joining the ship in Denpasar, Bali and that we are currently scheduled to leave Bali on October 20th.  They also informed us that, while the ship is in Bali, there will be a file crew aboard to film a pilot for a series about the Picton Castle.  Things just keep getting more and more interesting.

For the record, this post is coming to you from Taipei, Taiwan, where they are beginning the boarding process for the flight to Bali at this moment.  It's 7:00 PM on 9/27 there but it's 10:00 AM on 9/25 here...strange concept for me.  I fill in more details about that part of the trip in my next post.

(Yes, I'm very excited!)

I've Passed My First Test

I've been planning for what to pack on this little trip for quite some time now and the plan has been revised many times.  Most of what I'm taking is required and then I get to fill in the excess room with cloths.  I still worry that I'm taking too much but I've pared it down as much as I can.  Here are the results:

Before

I am packing many of the smaller things, like spare batteries and shampoo in Ziploc bags, mostly to make them more pack-able, than to protect them from the elements.  The picture is not quite complete, it doesn't include any electronics and their respective chargers, like my laptop and Kindle.









After

Two big duffel bags and a backpack. That is the sum of my worldly possessions for the next 9 months.















I will be departing Chicago this Saturday, 9/13/14, for the first leg of my journey.  I'm taking the Amtrak Empire Builder route to Portland to spend some time with 3 of my kids.  I've spent the last couple of weeks saying good-bye to people and, of course, the trip to Portland will be the last set of good-byes before I leave.  As excited as I am about the trip, it has still been sad saying good-bye to everyone especially my grand kids, since they will change so much while I'm away.
The next update will be from the train, if I can get wireless somewhere, or from Portland!