17Aug11: The Cascades (Rail Day 5)

The third leg of our journey was aboard Amtrak's the Cascades. This leg was by bus from Vancouver to Seattle, Washington, then by train from Seattle to Portland, Oregon. We stayed in Portland for four days before taking Amtrak's Coast Starlight to Emeryville, California, to get the California Zephyr.

The bus left Vancouver about half an hour late, but there were enough passengers that they split it into two buses. One bus made all the scheduled stops and the other, which we were on, was express to Seattle with no stops except customs. We made good time on the highway. US customs was a breeze, just a glance at our passports and the bags through the x-ray scanner. As we approached Seattle we could see Mount Rainier in the distance. We actually got to Seattle about 45 minutes early, which meant we had about a three hour layover before the train portion of the Cascades left for Portland.

The train left Seattle pretty much on time. The Cascades was another day train for us, so again we traveled coach. The entire time we had the beautiful Cascade Mountains to the east of us, our left-hand side as we headed south. We steadily lost time on the way to Portland. Approaching Portland we saw Mount St. Helens, Mount Adams, and Mount Hood. This train has convenient monitors situated in each car showing the next stop and expected arrival times.  Based on the information on those monitors we are called our Portland friends, Ed and Sally, to let them know that we would be arriving a little later.  However we arrived in Portland around 9:00 pm, right on time, in spite of the fact that the monitor still indicated that we would not arrive there for at least 10 more minutes.  Lucky for us Ed and Sally showed up promptly anyway.