Saturday, January 21, 2017

Amtrak to Portland & the Oregon Historic Route

In my previous post, I summarized my 5 weekends of the recent Vancouver trip. During my trip to Vancouver in 2015, I had crossed the border and visited Seattle. This time I went a state further south to Oregon (Portland). In this post I will highlight my long weekend in Portland. Well technically I spent 8hrs on two of those days traveling to/from Portland but that was an experience too.

I had landed in Vancouver on 6th Nov 2016, couple of days before Trump became the president elect. While there were talks of people crossing border into Canada, I was crossing border into US and trust me there were no people lined up to cross into Canada :) After watching Sheldon Cooper go on and on about trains in the show The Big Bang Theory, I decided to take the train from Vancouver to Portland. But the thing about the trains in US is that they take more time than taking the road and are a lot more expensive. So I took the bus from Vancouver to Seattle (4 hrs) and then train from Seattle to Portland (4 hrs). I left at 5:30am from Vancouver and made it to Portland by 2pm.
The Amtrak are so different than Indian Railways. The seats in Shatabdhi are better than Amtrak but the pantry in Amtrak lets you buy various food and also alcoholic beverages on the train. They have a observation deck inside the train which is pretty cool. The route between Seattle to Portland is considered to be a scenic one with water on one side for most part of the journey.

This day I did not do anything apart from meeting friends and eating. Somehow everyone wants to take you to an Indian place even if you just landed from India. Luckily managed to avoid Indian place for lunch and dinner on Day 1 but still ate some chats in the evening with my friend.

Second day started with a brunch at an Indian place with a lot of food. The weather was good so we drove across the Oregon Historic Route 30 to visit the Multnomah falls. There are various other falls and hiking trails on this route. It was drizzling a bit but was a good weather for an ice cream :)
 

The historic route in itself is along the Columbia river so the drive is pretty scenic. The roads are pretty amazing too.

We then stopped by the Crown Point Vista House which gives an amazing view of River Columbia.

The final stop for the day was Trillium Lake where you can hike a little. My friends told me that the lake has an amazing reflection of the mountains, however it was cloudy so we just got to see the lake

We ended our day by visiting yet another Indian place for dinner. The next morning it was raining so we couldn’t go visit any new place. We went to the nearby theater to watch a movie after which we went to yet another Indian place to have a vegetarian thali.

My train back was at 4pm to Seattle and I reached Vancouver by bus at midnight. It was one tiring but amazing weekend.

Restaurants visited in Portland
Blu Olive Mediterranean Bistro
Indian connection
Khao San
Chennai Masala
New taste of india

You might also be interested to read: Weekends in Vancouver, Seattle, Vancouver City  

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