Part of the Plan For Portland was to figure out the approximate plan for the next bit.
Well, that didn’t happen like I expected.

Getting to Yosemite turned out to be possible without a car, but tricky, and Amtrak’s system only acknowledging one of the many schedule options, the worst one, did not fill me with confidence. As it turned out, that really didn’t matter, as all of the accommodation in and adjacent to the park was full anyway.

I’ll skip through the swearing and the cursing, and cut to the bit where, after a month and a half, I’m giving up on the unplanned wandering mode of travel. It’s not that I can’t pick a destination to go to next, it just turns out that I don’t like it very much, mostly because I don’t like not knowing where I’m going to sleep. Maybe it’d be different if I were cycletouring+camping, or with a vehicle I could sleep in?

So I did some planning, not helped by the Amtrak site falling over at the worst possible time, though I did have a backup option if the train proved impossible to book. Or was out of beds.

The site failure was, in technical terms, a bit of a clusterfuck; First I couldn’t log in, then the site was just gone for a while, then it came back in “light” mode, which is where the fun really started.

Before that fun, I went for a walk to the river. Probably the Colombia River.

The path passes right by the end of the runway, and I had a plane go overhead as I walked, which was fun.

The stretch of sand on the other bank is part of Government Island, which is also where the forests that bridge is plunging into in the picture above is located.

And here’s the reason I took a walk; I’m standing in Oregon, across the water is Washington. I’m pretty sure that this is the first time I’ve been able to do this, to stand in one state and look at another. I’m sure it happened on train & car trips, but that does not feel like it’s the same thing, somehow.

I don’t think I’ve been in the same situation with countries yet.

The travel situation eventually resolved itself, but it took time.

1. The Amtrak site in ‘Right’ mode couldn’t cope with a credit card address without a ‘state’, wouldn’t allow a write-in, and claimed that one or more of the things I wanted to book were unavailable when I just put in a US state.
2. The phone line had an automated voice recognition system, which couldn’t understand my accent about 50% of the time.
3. Getting through to a person took around 9 minutes, and then they couldn’t hear me.
4. When the site came back up in full mode, it still claimed that parts of the journey were sold out.
5. What eventually did the job was running each leg of the trip through separately.

that backup plan I mentioned?

Las Vegas, which it turns out you can do fairly cheaply if you book ahead, pay attention to the fluctuations in room price, and, and this is important, don’t gamble unless you’re actually that good. There were Pyramid rooms at Space Egypt, a.k.a. the Luxor, for $33/night before tax & mandatory ‘resort fee’.

Once things were booked, I took a wander through downtown Portland, where they have a Beaver Fountain.

Took this in the evening, wandering back from a sports bar where three of the screens I could see were showing two different networks covering the Chicago Cubs vs. Cincinnati Reds game. Another one looked to be showing a thing on NFL injury recovery, but turned out to be a show about the draft for the NFL at a regional combine. Or maybe the regional combine, I’m not sure.

Anyway, a plane passed right over the carpark, and this time I was fast enough to get an awful picture.

And that’s more or less it for Portland.

There was a learning experience there, and some time was eaten up by planning out the rest of the trip, but it was still fun.

Finding the station again turned out to be simple,

… , and on my way in I noticed someone’s time machine parked outside.

At least, that’s what I’m assuming it is. Could be a mostly buried spaceship, with only the helm still visible.