October family trip Days 4,5 - Posted Tuesday October 12th

 Sunday around noon or 1 I left Eugene after a lunch with my family there.  I saw grandma again very briefly. The drive over the mountains to Redmond was easy and enjoyable.

Unfortunately but totally predictably, my mother hadn't packed a single piece of clothing or toiletries when I arrived in Redmond around 3:30 pm on Sunday.  We had a good Mexican dinner with some of Nick's family that I always am happy to see.  Then, as if by telepathy, one of them asked if we would like to come over for ice cream (well it was probably more about the Peach Cobbler she toiled over but for me...) and we eagerly accepted.  It was a fantastic piece of advanced home baking.  We stopped at WalMart and shopped out the last 20 minutes the store was open getting things my mother had on a little list.  She is good at list making I have to give her that.

When we got back to the house it was after 8. Still basically on Eastern time, I was getting tired.  No real packing occurred Sunday night either and what little time we had after dinner seemed to slip away very fruitlessly.  I slept very poorly with some recurring snippets of a dream that seem to go on and on. This does not happen to me all the time but it is unfortunately common, probably more so when I'm anxious or haven't had enough exercise.  I have definitely been conscious for the first 3 days that I haven't really been in 'vacation mode' and everything has seemed like a work task to be gotten through.  
Monday morning I was up quite early as has been the case every day so far this trip.  Though at times it seemed like it would never get underway, packing did get done before 9 am mostly.  There were a few last minute computer/work tasks my mom needed to accomplish before we could leave and a friend from church was stopping by to meet me and pick up some stuff. Meanwhile, Nick needed to take a car into a body shop for an estimate if not to drop it off for actual work.  Unfortunately they only wanted to take a few photos at this point so my mom's deer impact damaged car may end up sitting idle for 2 weeks instead of being fixed while she is away but getting things done promptly or easy isn't really a thing in 2021 so we're kind of resigned to these things.  Nick brought home Taco Bell breakfast which saved us from having to take time to cook (and then clean up) a breakfast.

I got a very nice call from  my manager at work letting me know my new position/promotion went through and some surprising good news about pay.  That was a nice unexpected call to get.

We got on the road at 10 or 10:30.  One thing I REALLY wanted to do before getting on the train was to get in as much of a hike as my mother can handle.  Even our 'family bedroom' is comically small and the roomette on the train from Chicago will be much smaller yet so I certainly didn't want to board the train full of energy.  We headed North on US-97.  The drive was very good but somebody with California plates made a very foolish and very reckless pass of a semi on a curve.  If there hadn't been a tiny bit of paved shoulder and wide lanes it would have been absolutely tragic. It wasn't even close, he and I were in the same lane at the same time.  I'm oddly blah about close calls like that because when it isn't my fault, there is just nothing at all I can or could do about it.  So I figure obsessing about it is not helpful.  But it was a serious near miss that it can't go unmentioned.  

The hike I ended up choosing for time and ease was Deschutes River Canyon state park a bit East of The Dalles.    It's the spot where the Deschutes dumps into the Columbia river and it has a lovely trail (actually 3 different trails from river side to quite high on a bluff) which parallel the river for about 5 miles.  Time was pretty limited but the 45 minutes or whatever we did squeeze in were appreciated.

Lunch had to be eaten in the car and we couldn't use the restroom at Taco Time because it was drive thru only.  This is apparently pretty common in Oregon still.  In NY we did have a phase of no dining rooms but it was MANY months ago that it ended.  Next up was a gas station which inexplicably and without any great signage, operates as a self-service station, not something that you see in Oregon except on Indian reservations.  We ate in the parking lot.  The last 90 miles to Portland Airport (on I-84) went quickly and pleasantly.  The rental car return was easy. I put in my request for a Lyft while we were still unloading the rental car.  Then we went to the Lyft/Uber waiting area.  At first the app didn't seem to say anything useful then it said it was looking for a driver and then it said a hearing impaired person would be coming for us and linked us to a Lyft page with some basic ASL to say Thank You etc.  I thought that was very interesting and thoughtful that Lyft has several pieces set up to make their work available to the hearing impaired.  But he was something like 15 minutes away.  Then suddenly I got an entirely net set of Lyft alerts with a different car, different driver and a shorter ETA.

Our new Lyft driver, Abderrahim had a nearly new Toyota Corolla with taxi issue seat covers. Not glamorous but the car was in great shape.  He helped us load our bags into the trunk (which we completely filled) then we got in to leave.  After about half a mile my phone dinged saying I was leaving my iPad behind.  This is a weird new alert that I think just came in with IOS 15 where iPhones alert if they have been near an iPad on the same account and then are NOT near it.  My heart instantly sank and I asked Abderrahim to please pull over so I could see if my backpack was with us.  Oddly, he pulled into the left lane which has no shoulder instead of onto the wide right shoulder.  But Airport Way wasn't busy enough for it to matter much.  My heart double sand when I realized my backpack wasn't in the car.  As we circled back to the airport I had horrible visions of losing my laptop, iPad, some credit cards and umpteen little accessories for said devices.  Thankfully it was just sitting there on the concrete seating thing chilling where I had left it.  What an awful feeling.  Abderrahim got a 20 dollar bill in appreciation for being kind about it all.

With that self-imposed drama we still got to the train station about 4:15 for our 4:45 departure which was plenty of time to quickly check in and then slither our way through the mob of crabby coach passengers who were completely blocking the path to the lounge where they really want you to go so they can pre-board sleeper car customers before letting the mob out.

Our car attendant, James, is helpful and accommodating.  My mom has been on Amtrak several times but never in a sleeper.  This is MY first time in a Family Bedroom which is very wide (the width of the entire train car) but not very deep.  It has the most square footage of the rooms except maybe the accessible bedroom but it does not have any toilet or other plumbing in it.  It's basically a very wide nearly vertical backed bench running the width of the car with a single jump seat that can be folded down that faces the other way.  Riding Amtrak is always a mixed bag of 'oh how clever' and 'what were they thinking' moments.  Our room has a useful sized trash bin instead of the quart sized micro bin Roomettes have.  There is a closet which looks like a full 24 to 30" square but when you open it, surprise, it's all of 4 inches deep.  And the door tends to fling open when you go over bumps.  As always, dinner on the first night of Portland originating Empire Builder trains was a cold boxed meal. This is because the dining car starts off in Seattle with the other half of the train and then marriage happens in Spokane around midnight at a very extended stop.  The choices were a Nicoise salad with beef, shrimp or tofu or a chicken sandwich.  I had the salad Mom had a sandwich.  It was totally reasonable quality food and between the bean burrito that was part of my lunch and the large spinach base of my dinner salad, Monday was probably a pretty healthy eating day overall.

I put a lot of thought and prep into having a number of movies we could watch on my laptop.  We watched Liar Liar (Jim Carey) and my mom howled with laughter.  It's a well done movie and I still laugh despite having watched it a handful of times. The dual headphone jacked USB headphone amplifier worked well so we could both wear our headphones and hear the movie clearly.  We made a brief visit to the observation car but there wasn't any ice cream available so I settled for a rice krispie treat from the bakery in Reading PA that has a whole line of above average treats. I like seeing them do well.  

James set our beds up very quickly and we headed to bed. The absurdity level of contorting into an upper berth on a train is substantial.  It's impossibly claustrophobic.  Thankfully Amtrak upped their pillow game substantially so we had a total of 4 good sized pillows in the room. The pillows used to be very small thin pillows so we actually brought 2 new pillows with us but they may not get used.  I read a single chapter of Radium Girls (very awkwardly) in my bunk then flung the book towards my feet so it would fall down into the seat below when I was done.  Getting in and out of the bunk is such an ordeal I couldn't really do any better.  

Possibly helped by not sleeping well the night before (and having done this train thing a number of times), I actually slept adequately.  No weird dreams etc but almost anybody is going to wake many times throughout the night on a train. My mom got almost zero sleep. Not unusual for the first night on the train. I hope she sleeps more tonight.

Breakfast time now. More updates tomorrow.  I unfortunately have no photos from these days.