Oregon or Bust.

So we decided to go to Oregon to celebrate our tenth (10th) wedding anniversary. We had a couple of flight vouchers, and I always like to give Anna a chance to spend time with Jonathan. We started out our journey by driving to Denver. We were just going to hit I-70 at Oakley and go on over, but shortly before we hit Scott City we came upon the world's largest object being transported on Highway 83... at 35 MPH. I never got a good view of the object, as it was surrounded by pilot cars and such, but it literally took up three lanes of traffic. As Highway 83 only has 2 lanes, and after I thought about the fact that there is nowhere for such an object to pull over between Scott and Oakley, we changed course and took 96 west. Tom, our personal navigator, did not think this was a good idea at all, but I overruled him.

Here is a picture of Anna and I riding on the shuttle bus at the Denver Airport. We only found out later that driving Denver Airport shuttle buses is a favorite occupation of alleged terrorists. I think there is probably about 10 minutes between when this picture was taken and when we realized we had left Anna's booster seat in the car.
We got to Portland super late, and rode another shuttle to our hotel. We rode with a family of surfers (and their surfboards) who had just come back from two weeks in Hawaii, where they had attended two (2) weddings. They were from Bend, which seemed like an odd choice to me.
The next day we took the light rail downtown so we could check our bags in with Amtrak. Once at Union Station we ate at the restaurant there:



After lunch we went to an ice cream shop that the friendly Amtrak man told us about and then across the street to this cool splash park.
Betsy had pity on Anna and let her take of her dress and really have fun.
And then a fellow parent had pity on us and gave us the brand new pair of panties which she had been carrying around in her purse for a month in the hope that her own daughter would stop wearing diapers. Meanwhile, I talked on the phone.

Then we got on the train to Eugene. Anna and Betsy spent their time reading and stuff.
But outside the window it was harvest time, so I had plenty to see.
Like wheat harvest.

And edible bean harvest.
Anna got a lot of homework done.
After we got to Eugene, we took a taxi to the airport to rent a car. We were supposed to rent a car in downtown Eugene, but they didn't have any cars there, despite our three month old reservation. And the guy at the airport didn't even know about the Seinfeld episode about car rental reservations:

After we got our itty-bitty Kia, we drove to Target, where they just so happened to have booster seats on clearance.
Then we drove from Eugene to Medford, and I decided that three (3) hours of Oregon driving is equal to approximately seven (7) hours of Kansas driving in terms of fatigue. There were cars everywhere and we had to climb hills and come down hills and the road had this really annoying habit of curving every half mile. Ridiculous.