We're Baa-aack

After leaving Point Reyes NS yesterday, we headed down towards Santa Clara. According to Waze, there were a couple of options for ways (haha, see what I did there?!) we could go, but instead of taking the quicker route around the Oakland-side of the bay, M chimed in that he wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge. 

Then he promptly fell asleep.

And couldn't be roused when we actually crossed the bridge. *sigh*

So, we crawled our way through San Francisco in late-Saturday-afternoon traffic on Highway 1 for naught. Ugh! Torture for the driver, not so bad for the nappers. 

Get to the Point

Of the 28 NPS units in the state of California, we have visited 26 of them. Today we checked Point Reyes National Seashore off our list, leaving only Redwood National Park and Castle Mountains National Monument to go.

College Shopping

M is now in his junior year of high school, so over the past year we have been exploring various colleges just to give him an idea of what each campus is like. Of course, the standard was set with the first one we visited - the University of Illinois! We have also taken tours of UCLA, UC Irvine, and Cal Poly. Since the boys had a four-day weekend for Easter, we left right after school on Thursday for the 5.5-hour drive up to Berkeley.

All Aboard!

Riding the rails in 2009

In talking with our friends, we figured out why the airfares leaving Portland were so much more expensive: schools in Oregon start their spring break this weekend. That's probably also why our train fares were less expensive departing on Thursday as opposed to Friday.

To get home, we took Amtrak's Coast Starlight, which runs between Seattle and Los Angeles with an overnight on the train. In 2009, we took the California Zephyr from Sacramento to Chicago, spending two nights on board, and the boys still rank that vacation as one of our best trips. So, they were very enthusiastic about taking the train from Portland on the condition that we get full-size berths and a private bathroom in the sleepers. (On the California Zephyr, we had a family room with smaller child berths and a shared bathroom down the hall.)

They barely fit back then!

Keep Portland Weird

Today was our last day in Portland. After breakfast this morning, we decided to walk over to Powell's City of Books. This bookstore is enormous - it takes up several floors on a whole city block!

Books galore!

Wonderful Waterfalls

As I was looking into things to do during our short time in Portland, a segway tour of the city sounded it could be really fun. But a segway tour of Portland in the cold and rain?

Not so much.

So, we moved on to Plan B for today: driving the scenic Historic Columbia River Highway.