This is gonna be a short one, sorry!
Today was mostly about bidding farewell to Portland and getting to Seattle. This morning we were greeted by a cold drizzle, a quintessential Pacific Northwest fall day that seemed tailored to the occasion. We went to Union Station to take our Amtrak Cascades train in the morning.
Portland’s train station remained exactly like I so vividly remembered. Walking into it feels like stepping into a bygone era, like you somehow ended up inside a Humphrey Bogart movie: polished stone surfaces, brass fixtures, wooden benches (remember when stations had benches?! Remember when we could sit in places?), neon signs indoors… They even have phone stalls, which I don’t remember noticing in my previous trip, although only one public telephone remains.
We checked our bags like at an airport, although we later learned this wasn’t compulsory (I heard a conductor say it’s “recommended”, maybe in case they run out of room?), and then we proceeded to the Business Class waiting area, a comfortable but incongruously modern lounge with sofas and free coffee and water facilities.
When we finally got on our haggard-looking train, which was newer than the train station but not by very much, our business class experience felt somewhat less so by the fact that you cannot reserve seats, so we had to resign ourselves to two seats in a freezing car next to the bistro. The trip was uneventful, quiet, with beautiful views of the Willamette and Columbia rivers to the west, besmirched occasionally by monstrous factories built right on the shore.
Of note: we were planning to eat on the train, but after we lined up at the bistro bar, the attendant informed us that they were out of food! Out of food, at 1PM? Out of food, in America?! So yeah, we just white-knuckled the rest of the trip -thankfully, we only had an hour to go- and ate a sandwich at a cafe right next to King Street Station one in Seattle.
I thought we might leave our bags at the station and do some sightseeing, but turns out luggage storage is $10 per bag, which feels steep if you just need it for an hour or two, so instead we killed time until we could get up to our apartment all the way up in Eastlake. This one is nicer than the one in Portland, not least because it has a balcony from which you can see the Space Needle!
After unpacking, we walked over to a nearby grocery store, where we were shocked by how expensive everything is: $6 for a bag of chips! $10 for ham! $8 for jam! This looks like a well-to-do neighborhood, judging from the state of the houses around these mostly residential streets, but in fact these prices are in keeping with what we’ve seen so far everywhere else so I think the PNW is just expensive! Well, we can’t very well not eat, so in these situations I just accept that’s the reality of the place and tell myself I didn’t come here to save money!
The only thing left was to have dinner, which we want out to get at an Italian restaurant recommended by the apartment owners. The food was delicious, although even the half-portions were so enormous that we had to take half of everything to go, but what’s most memorable about the place is how dim the lighting was. Atmospheric lighting is one thing, but we couldn’t even read the menu!
Well, we are in Seattle now. Tomorrow we start exploring!
This Is A Lake 