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!)