I don't think I slept much on the way to Spokane, if at all. It seems like we had to wait about an hour in Spokane for the train to Portland. (It was a train instead of a bus this time.) Maybe it was late in arriving, since it's the same train that runs from Portland and they just turn it around, I think. In Spokane you can't go out to watch the trains like you can at L.A. Union Station, you have to wait inside until they call you for boarding.

We got to Pasco around 5:30, and I didn't sleep after that because it was light. The train stays on the Washington side of the river until Vancouver, then it crosses into Oregon at Portland. The bus stayed on the Oregon side because that's where the Interstate is. There's a main line railroad on each side of the river (BNSF on the north, UP on the south), but only one main highway.

We got into Portland a little before 10:00, and the southbound Coast Starlight doesn't come through until after 2:00, so I had 4 hours to spend in Portland with my sore feet. I ended up walking almost 4 miles because I wanted to see as much of the city as my feet could stand. I would have spent more time walking around in Washington Park if I hadn't been partially crippled.

My seat mate when I got on the train was another twenty-something kid, but we didn't talk much. He only went to Sacramento. He seemed to spend a lot of time somewhere else, because I think I had the seat to myself overnight. Not that I slept much.

I went up to the lounge car once we got to Sacramento so I could get in the dining car as soon as they opened it. At first it was just me and a wide guy across from me at the table, but about the time we ordered they brought a woman who sat next to me. The conversation was dominated by someone across the aisle from us who was talking about a guy he saw getting thrown off the train. I think this run of the Coast Starlight had more than the usual number of people thrown off along the way. 2 people had gotten thrown off at Albany, Oregon for smoking, and there was another smoker thrown off at Eugene. But some guy apparently wandered onto the train at Dunsmuir without a ticket. On top of that he was supposedly smoking pot, spouting Bible verses and being belligerent and generally obnoxious at 1 in the morning.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. I had another twenty-something seat mate from Oakland to San Jose, and yet another who showed up somewhere after that and disappeared just as mysteriously somewhere between two stations. I got a sandwich for lunch and didn't have dinner. The train was an hour late getting to L.A. It made stops that it hadn't made on the way up, like Burbank Airport. I guess somebody pulled the cord.