Somehow I arrived at Union Station an hour earlier than I had planned. Better than arriving an hour late.

They assigned seats as we checked in at Union Station, and I got a better-than-average seat mate. He was a college kid from New Hampshire or someplace in that part of the country, on his way to a mountaineering class in British Columbia. I think he had been rerouted because of the flooding in the upper Midwest. We talked most of the way until one or both of us started going up to the lounge car or otherwise moving around the train. He wondered what a lot of things were that we went past, and I knew most of them, so I was his tour guide. After I went to dinner I didn't see him again until 2:30 or so in the morning. He came back to his seat to get something and said he had been playing cards in the lounge car with a bunch of people his age. He said he was going back to the lounge car to spend the rest of the night, so I could spread out across both seats. I never saw him again after that.

Dinner was with a music teacher from San Francisco who was being harassed into early retirement, and a couple of women who met each other years ago through singing with the Sweet Adelines. One of them was probably younger than me and the other was probably older. One of the fun things about eating in the dining car is that you're forced to share a table with strangers who are forced to share a table with you, so you have interesting conversations with people that you would never otherwise talk to. Most of the time you never even find out their names.

Sleeping really didn't work out that night. The two seats folded down together were sort of like a 3 1/2-foot square bed with a hard ridge in the middle, so the only position possible was lying on my side with my knees drawn up. I woke up several times to roll over to the other side, and my back killed me every time I did. I got up as soon as it started getting light and went up to the lounge car to watch Mt. Shasta as we went past and around it as the sun came up. I was near the dining car so I could be one of the first ones in.

Breakfast was with C.J. Riley and a younger couple who were on their way to Eugene, and they were going to bicycle from there to San Francisco, I think. I only found out C.J. Riley's name because I asked him how to find his books when he mentioned that he wrote about trains and railroads.

There was also a retired Amtrak engineer on the train, and I got to talk to him for a while.

The train was on time all the way to Portland, and we even got there early. Normally they run a train from Portland to Spokane to meet up with the main section of the Empire Builder from Seattle, but with reduced ridership because of the Midwest flooding (no through traffic to Chicago), they just ran a couple of buses. Mine was less than half full, and the other one might have been too. Mine stopped in Vancouver and a couple of small towns along the way, even dropping someone off at the McDonald's in Hood River. That can't be a normal stop, because the train runs on the other side of the river at that point. We had a 15-minute break at a Pilot truck stop at some random point along the route, so nobody had to use the chemical toilet on the bus. There were a couple of people on the bus who were going to Pasco, and the driver told them they were on the wrong bus. We stopped for a second rest stop in Pasco, but I think the other bus bypassed all the small towns and went directly to Pasco.

I got a little bit of sleep on the bus. I decided I'd rather ride a bus than a train overnight. You can see the small towns approaching, so it's more like being in a car. There's something magical about driving through the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, and you just don't get that feeling on a train where you can only see out to the side.

We got to Spokane sometime before 1 AM, I think, and had to wait about an hour for the train. It was a nice uncrowded train with plenty of empty seats. I got a little more sleep before it started getting light.