Road Trips and Hike Reports

My step-mother started struggling with Alzheimer's disease a few years ago.  For a while it was gradual and manageable but at the end of 2025 it had progressed to a pretty debilitating state.  When my father told me in January about the latest developments, it seemed clear her time was nearing an end.  We booked a trip to visit as soon as was practical for us since we couldn't know with ANY precision how much longer she would live but also that, ultimately, if our visit landed before she passed we'd get to say goodbye and if it landed after her passing we could probably help my dad with the immense task of getting the house in order after being focused on the many aspects of caring for my step-mother for so long. We already had a train trip planned to go to Chicago and Madison (WI) in March so we mushed the 2 trips together. As it turned out our visit was too late to visit Judee who passed quietly at home on February 12th, 2026.  There wasn't any formal funeral servi...

The rest of our time in Central Oregon with family went well enough.  It's always tough when you just have 2 days since there is only so much that can be done in that time.  We ended up walking around Sisters again on Thursday (with my mom) and she had fun browsing and buying a few things. Friday we headed over to Portland.  The drive was ok overall but the pass over Mount Hood was crowded and annoying.  When we got the car returned at PDX airport we had to decide between transit or a Lyft to get downtown to the train station.  We ended up using Trimet and it was totally fine.  We got off on the East side of the Willamette river and walked across the Steel Bridge rather than walking from Old Town on the West side of the river.  There really weren't very many people (homeless or otherwise) around but it was quite warm. Unfortunately our inbound train was very late so we left about 2.5 hours late.  In the end the train made up half of that time on t...

Our 2nd day with my Dad was fun.  We had dinner the first night at the Old Spaghetti Factory which, as usual, was adequate food but served in a great environment.  They are now in what used to he the venerable Oregon Electric Station restaurant downtown near the 5th Street Public Market.  The Spaghetti Factory better be a LOT busier than it was when we went because their dining room(s) are huge at this location.  On the 2nd night we went to Red Robin which isn't very groundbreaking either but it's someplace we always used to go to as a family and has been very popular in Eugene for years.  That 2nd night in Eugene ended fairly early so we could rest up and get an early start the next day heading over to Central Oregon. Wednesday we got on the road a little before 8 am.  We had a basic breakfast and a short, somewhat underwhelming and buggy walk along the Leaburg Canal .  I did not know until just now that the entire Leaburg dam is being decommissioned ...

Our flights to PDX went well. While maybe a little underwhelming, having a dinner on our first class leg from Detroit to Portland was a novel experience.  The Portland airport, which I used to work at, has gone through some very widely Instagram covered renovations.  I wasn't surprised by seeing the light colored wood and curving walls of the new terminal but I was surprised at how cavernous and cathedral like the height of the ceilings are now.  It's very fresh and modern looking and feels like they worked to downplay the walls that have increasingly made airports feel very segmented with a check-in area then a huge security screening area and then the secure area with concourses etc.  That's all still present at PDX now but it's been blended into a more natural flow with less jarring transitions.  It was also interesting to see how they blended the new areas and the old.  As PDX has done for decades, the carpets and colors don't jarringly change and while...

Our dinner at Legal Sea Foods went very well. Everybody enjoyed the food and especially the deserts.  We played Yahtzee and had over-priced beers from a fun self-service beer tap thing in the hotel lobby.  Brian took DayQuil and was finally able to sleep well. We got up nice and early and had breakfast in the insanely busy hotel lobby.  There really wasn't much else to do this morning so we were in our rental car before 9 am and headed out of town.  We were able to (with effort and Brian talking to a manager) get a late checkout for my parent's room.  This somewhat cut down their long wait at Logan airport.  They took a taxi to the airport and hopefully are enjoying their flights as much as is possible. Our drive home went very well.  The Mass Pike was busy but there weren't a lot of annoying people and the rental Honda Accord is a good road trip car except for the loud road noise.  We bought the last few cat supplies when we got home and are no...

Getting off the ship wasn't too time consuming. If fact I think we were at our Seaport area hotel before 9 am that morning.  The main challenge is finding your luggage.  Our luggage was in Pink group 6 and Dad and step-mother's was in a different group.  These seem like pretty small sections of luggage but really all the pink luggage ended up together regardless of the number etc.  So it was a small ocean of bags in each color group.  Still, it took at most, 15 minutes to gather it all up and get a taxi with the aid of a baggage handler.  Just like on the embarkation, everybody working at the Boston Cruise port was super helpful and polite. We dropped our bags off at the hotel then headed into Boston, hoping to find something to eat and something to do while we waited for a hopefully early notice that at least one room was ready.  My first place to try visiting was Charlestown navy yard .  Our wonderfully helpful Lyft driver, John, had a ton of in...

Bar Harbor was a gorgeous place to drop anchor.  And since it was the only port that was too small for us to directly dock at, we literally did drop anchor there. Unfortunately, the health issues continue to plague our group and I was the only one well enough to go on shore.  I enjoyed the shuttle trips both ways.  It’s really weird to walk from a very large boat to a relatively small one while neither is anywhere near a dock.  The trip TO Bar Harbor I was on a contracted dinner cruise type boat (good sized) but on the way back to the ship I was on one of our ship’s own tenders which are really fancy lifeboats but somewhat better equipped.  For lunch I ate at West Street Cafe and had a spicy chicken sandwich and coleslaw.  Though there are a few deep fried items on the ship, they seem few and far between so it hit the spot as did the blueberry mule.   Other than the trips to and from and the lunch, Bar Harbor wasn’t my favorite.  Far more than an...

This sea day went by very nicely.  There isn’t a lot of exceptional news to report.   I had asked early on in the cruise if there were any behind the scenes culinary tours scheduled for this sailing.  The guest services officer said there were not but we could request a bridge tour if we wanted.  It took several days but we did hear back from the bridge department and were invited to tour the bridge.  There were 11 people on this tour.  I was impressed with one of the younger women on our tour who asked some of the same questions I was going to ask about how waste is processed etc.  Interestingly, both gray and black water are treated and typically discharged when the ship is in open seas.  We learned the usual things about how many diesel generators there are on the ship (6) and about how they slow down for whales etc.  The bridge crew was mostly Italian which is an interesting contrast to the majority of servers and cabin crew who are at le...

With an excursion that started at 8:30, we had to have an early morning breakfast.  My dad still didn’t feel well enough for breakfast so it was just Brian and I.  We were offered a water view at a shared table so we sat with a nice table of people from Arizona, Minnesota and Rhode Island.  Since my dad wasn’t responding to text messages early in the morning we didn’t make plans for breakfast which left my step-mother out of the loop and she ended up neither dining not going on the excursion with us.  Since she wouldn’t be comfortable going out on her own for breakfast, I hurried through the ship in the few minutes between breakfast and our excursion boarding to bring back a few sandwiches for her to nibble on. The bus driver and tour guide (2 separate people) were both better on this excursion.  The driver was smoother and the narration from the guide wasn’t as grating and seemed on-topic more than Sydney’s.  This trip was also on better/bigger roads so th...

I was so tired that I had no trouble sleeping through the night without any interruptions.  I would never have imagined that a ship in motion in the ocean could be so silent and stable.  The only time, so far, that I’ve had any physical sense of motion is when walking around.  Even then it’s so subtle that it just feels like I’m slightly light-headed or something, not really like the ship is moving around. I had breakfast with my father and we left Brian and step-mother asleep in the rooms.  I was impressed that there is a person who just wanders around handing out muffins and pastries.   I tried one of the daily specials, Spinach Florentine. This is a familiar sounding dish but not something I’d ever tried in a Benedict type dish and it was so delicious I was honestly surprised.  They served a Swiss cheese sauce with it that was amazing.  So many components of the food here are made in house that the triangle of fried hash brown seemed out of characte...

My parents flew Southwest airlines to get from Oregon to Boston.  Their first flight ran late which left them with no spare time to connect in Denver and nothing to eat except Southwest snacks.  By the time they arrived after midnight they had been away from any opportunity to eat real food for about 11 hours and unfortunately, nothing obvious presented itself on our never ending walk through Boston airport to the hotel.  We did look at the few grab and go things available near the front desk of the hotel but ultimately they were pretty grim looking and my dad decided to wait until breakfast. Breakfast started a little earlier than planned because my parents were understandably very hungry when they woke up. Brian and I joined them mid-meal at the hotel's breakfast only restaurant for eggs benedict (for me) and sticky bun french toast for Brian.  After going back and forth in my mind many times I ultimately decided to try one of Lyft's 'black car' services instead o...