As soon as we arrived in Seattle I realized I had made a mistake. I often misread plane departure times, thinking they leave an hour or two later than they actually do. I've actually missed planes because of this disease. So Eric wasn't extremely surprised when I announced that I had misread the time our train departed from Seattle. However, he was surprised at how far off I was. I thought it left the evening of Sept. 1. It actually left the morning of Sept. 2.

That meant that we had 24 hours in Seattle. I love Seattle and always wanted to move there when I was living in Olympia, Wash. in 1986. It is a very cool town. I've been back a few times on business trips, but only for a few hours. Eric was there only once, and spent the whole time visiting a friend in the suburbs. So we figured 24 hours in Seattle was a real opportunity.

Luckily, it occurred to us to go the train station first, to see if we could stow our bags instead of hauling them all over town. Amtrak let us check them a day early. So we only had a few day packs to haul around.

We got a cheap ($40) hotel near downtown, and then started walking a lot. We went by the wharf, which is cheesy like Fisherman's Wharf in SF; then we went by Pike Place market, and for the evening, we picked a neighborhood at random and took a taxi there.

Eric picked Fremont, which is probably best known for its life size statues of a group of people waiting for a bus. The statue is quite convincing since it's also an actual bus stop. We also saw a statue of Lenin that had been found toppled over somewhere in Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR. It was huge, and supposedly one of the only statues that shows Lenin to be warlike (there are flames in the background, and supposedly a gun, though I didn't see the gun), instead of a bookish scholar. We also saw the "troll" statue--a huge metal ... troll whose huge hand is crushing an actual VW Bug. The troll is under a bridge. Later we ate at a brewery, which for Eric was one of the biggest draws of all. Eventually we caught a bus back.

The next day (Sept. 2) we caught Amtrak to San Francisco. Much of the ride had stunning scenery. We loved seeing the Columbia River gorge and the Pacific Ocean and valleys and other rivers. Unfortunately we sat next to a guy who is more obnoxious than Archie Bunker. He spent the whole trip complaining in a loud voice about the service, the food, and anything else that came to mind.

Every once in awhile, he whipped out his video camera to get a shot of the ocean, but trees would suddenly block his way. "Damn trees!" he'd yell. Then he'd force his wife to narrate. She spoke much more quietly than he did and you could tell by how she launched into the job, with only a little prodding, that she'd been forced to narrate before.

He was awful. Eric said it was so bad it was actually funny. At one point, I asked the guy in charge of our train car to turn off the muzak tape, because it was warped, so it was playing funny and it was annoying. The other passengers didn't like it either. But it turned out old Archie said it was the only think that relaxed him. When the conductor mentioned turning it off, Archie groused that maybe "they" would like if it were rap.

I couldn't stand it any longer. I mentioned a bit acidly that perhaps he hadn't noticed, but it was playing oddly. He allowed that it "skipped" from time to time. Then he started complaining some more, and I told him I'd rather listen to the warped music than him. His response surprised me. It was an attempt to guilt-trip me, but it was also partly genuine, I think. He said he wasn't himself because his sister had died two weeks earlier. He said he didn't like himself either and he couldn't blame me at all if I didn't like listening to him.

Now Archie was a very sour guy, so I knew it had taken a lifetime of practice, not just two weeks of grief over his sibling. I did feel a bit bad for him. But not too much. Apparently his wife didn't feel too bad either. That night she got up to sleep elsewhere because she couldn't stand sleeping next to him. She called him obnoxious, too.

Our train stopped for about 90 minutes in the middle of the night because the crew thought we had struck a person on the tracks. They searched and searched with flashlights but couldn't find a body. They concluded that the person had gotten away. I feel very lucky that a) we didn't hit anyone and b) that Archie and I slept through this.

We got into San Francisco around noon on Sept. 3, about three hours late. Eric and I ran some errands and then hopped the bus back to our old neighborhood where we ran some more errands before meeting up with my mom and brother. We all went out to ice cream and to my shock, my brother paid. He hasn't paid for hardly anything for me since I was a kid. He said he was paying because I didn't have job. I love it. Then he bought the bagels we wanted to get for the train trip to LA, and insisted on giving us $20 for dinner. The next morning my mother took me and Eric out to breakfast. She hasn't treated me for ages either. I've got to go home jobless more often.

That afternoon we met up with Katie and Roland. It was nice to see them again, because it make me feel like I'm really home. Their apartment is the same layout as our old one, so it seems like the same place. I miss having them for neighbors. That night, we had a massive pizza fest--you know, you're only in town for one night so you have to invite all your friends to one meal and hope you get to talk to at least a few of them. The gang included us, Katie and Roland, my mom, our friend Andre, and Leo of Mississippi fame. We didn't have time to call many of our other friends, and we feel badly about that. Luckily, by total coincidence, as we were walking to pizza, we ran into one of these other friends, Margaret, who lives in Sausalito. She just happened to be in the area and it was great seeing her.

The next morning, we got back onto Amtrak, saw more spectacular scenery, and fell three hours behind schedule, partly because of a fire across the train track at Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, Calif. We got in at midnite.

This was the beginning of our friend Dawn's wedding celebration. Now I don't like to report on weddings here on the Internet, but I'll give a few details of the happenings around the event. We were totally psyched about the wedding not only on its own account, but because it gave us a chance to party with our friends Perrin and Chase.

Perrin met us at the train and whooshed us off to her sister Bonnie's house in Long Beach. The next day, we got some great face time with the bride to be, as we ran around Long Beach, doing errands. You must get an idea of Dawn, whom we affectionately call DB (for Dawn Baby), if you don't already know her. Dawn is the kind of person who might plan to hike down the Grand Canyon and back up and still think she has time to catch a play in Los Angeles the same night.

So the day before her wedding, what did Dawn do? She spent a lot of time helping me buy a pair of shoes (I was a bridesmaid in her wedding, and the shoes I had Perrin buy for me were a wee bit small). Then she picked up her niece to help her open a bank account! She would have also gone with her niece to the DMV to help her get a learner's permit, but luckily for the wedding, her niece didn't have the proper ID, so the planned trip was aborted. Dawn could have done this a month before the wedding or a month after, but somehow she figured she could do it the day before. Until Perrin talked her out of it, DB also considered throwing Perrin a wedding shower the morning of DB's own wedding. OK. So you get the idea.

We ran lots and lots of errands. That night we went out to the rehearsal dinner--all you can eat sushi!--and stayed in a hotel in Gardena, where we had a chance to party with Perrin and Chase. Actually Perrin was a bit pooped, and I spent part of the time giving DB a pre-wedding shiatsu massage, so it was mostly Eric and Chase partying.

The next day we all had a great time at the wedding.

That night, Eric and I and Perrin and Chase went back to Carlsbad, to see the Perrin and Chase abode. It's a trailer on some really pretty land, and inside, it doesn't seem like a trailer at all. Chase makes furniture and restores antiques for a living so the whole place is very nicely furnished. It was a great rest. We went out to pizza and the next day we went swimming in the ocean.

That night, after much scrambling around to pick up the bikes (Perrin must have driven us around the airport about five times looking for the place) we had shipped from Juneau, we got on the red-eye to Costa Rica.

We were both sick. Eric had caught a cold in San Francisco, and the same cold caught up with me in Carlsbad. By the time we got on our plane, we were both competing with each other for very small supplies of dry napkins.

Next: Costa Rica

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