I had an incredibly long day yesterday. It would have been about two and a half hours shorter if not for the delayed return Amtrak train from Portland to Seattle, but, whatever; I'll get to that later. As it was, I woke up at 4:40, so I could be ready in time to pack a lunch—which I barely had time to do—before walking over to the Capitol Hill Station to take light rail down to International District Station, then walk about a block west to King Street Station and catch the Amtrak Cascades train that left at 7:22 a.m. They were well underway with boarding when I arrived; I could have been there ten minutes earlier but I barely missed a light rail trail and had to wait for the next one. Anyway, thanks to the delayed return train, plus my fucking Photos app on the iMac not recognizing my photos in iCloud for a good hour or so after I restarted and then again rebooted my computer, necessitating manual import via direct cord connection to my iPhone which even itself was rife with glitches, I did not get all of my photos properly uploaded and tagged on Flickr until after midnight; I finally got to sleep at 12:43.
Being a long day, though, and still a very eventful day, I took a record number of photos in one day thus far this year during my Birth Week—
105 shots, in fact; seven of those video clips, four of the video clips embedded in this very blog post. You wouldn't know it to look at my
Birth Week 2022 collection of photo albums, though, as I have them there separated into three different photo albums: "Amtrak to Portland and Back"; "MAX Light Rail"; and "The Grotto." This way they can be separated by separate train rides, plus the visit to The Grotto that I took between Amtrak train rides (also between MAX train rides, incidentally). I still have these three separated photo albums
grouped on their own as a "Portland 2022" collection, which I now have
two of, thanks to both the 2021 and 2022 trips to Portland yielding so many photos (yesterday's is particularly striking, though, as I did not stay overnight, but still took a ton of photos within the space of one day). That said, I still have all of yesterday's photos put into one single photo album, to make them more efficiently part of my
history of trips to Portland albums collection. There, you can see, our 2021 anniversary trip has by far the record high number of photos of any trip to Portland, though, to be fair, that also included
Nutty Narrows Bridge and Multnomah Falls, albeit combined only 33 shots; the other 110 still being from Portland proper—barely still beating the 105 shots I took yesterday, and among those, 79 were taken in Portland proper.
Anyway. That's still not even all the photo album collections I needed to add yesterday's photos to! I also added the full, 105-shot album to my
Travels 2022 collection, which I didn't even think to do until last night. But, single day trip or not, it still counts as a day of travel, especially being both out ot state and necessitating advance travel booking. I have prospective travels through the rest of the year also listed there, but time will tell how successful I am at making them all happen: Toronto for our anniversary remains a wish not yet booked; back to Denver to see Sara remains a hope; Leavenworth in September is official, at least, as is staying overnight with Jennifer next weekend, and there's a new possible prospect of traveling to Anchorage with Alexia sometime this year.
Side note: I have to admit, I try to keep a single day's number of photos and videos under 100, and get a little annoyed with myself when I can't. This is entirely a product of my OCD tendencies, as it has to do with the naming convention I use for photo files, making it a lot easier to keep them organized and in chronological order: I use the date, then a dash, then a two-digit code for numbering them: 05052022-01, 05052022-02, and so on. The most annoying is when I name them this way before realizing they will be over 100, and only at the 100th shot does the post-dash number go from two digits to three: 05052022-99 to 05052022-100. When this happens, Finder on my iMac moves the -100 to the top of the list and therefore sorts it out of order. Very annoying! Thankfully I counted all the photos yesterday before I got them imported and needed to rename the files, so I could start with 05052022-001, 05052022-002, and so on. It's still kind of annoying when the file names for other dates all have only two digits after the dash, and all of these have to have three. But, I wanted to keep all these photos. I didn't want to sacrifice six of them just to make this less irritating.
It's also kind of interesting to me that I took the most photos and videos yesterday, when I spent the entire day by myself—this is hardly the first time I have traveled by myself, but I think it would be the first time I "took a trip" just by myself, with no one in particular to visit, especially one out of state and 174 miles from home, to an entirely different, major city. This is something Ivan does all the time (in fact he took the last of his many solo trips to Portland about a month ago, when he posted photos to Facebook of The Grotto which was why I went there myself; I had never heard of it before) and it had long made me think it would be something I would enjoy. Mind you, if Shobhit hadn't been working yesterday (he wound up calling out due to food poisoning, different story), I would have been delighted for him to come with me. But since he wasn't, and all my friends work on Thursdays, I was also perfectly content just to go on my own—and, crucially, get the most obvious train system, Amtrak, included in my train-themed Birth Week.
It does also mean yesterday was the only day this week with no Social Review points for anyone. And still it was the most photogenic day! That kind of amuses me.
I didn't even realize I'd have an opportunity to add a
third train to my "trains itinerary" for my Birth Week, until I looked up public transit routing between Portland's Union Station and The Grotto. MAX Light Rail was never part of my advanced planning for the week, but of course I was delighted to have another train to ride. Now, Union Station is in a part of town that is kind of scuzzy, and like so many other major cities these days, Portland is littered with homeless people camped in tents on sidewalks. It can be an exercise in ambivalence, trying to reconcile compassion for people without homes and how much of an eyesore all those tents are. If nothing else, I'll give homeless people in Portland this much credit over those in Seattle: at least in the areas of Portland that I saw, the tents were not surrounded by mounts of trash and filth. Although, okay, you can see in the shot above that the closest MAX station to Union Station had plenty of garbage strewn about. This seems to be just typical of any city neighborhood around its central train station.
Although I had been more excited to ride the Amtrak Coast Starlight on the way back, the ride on the shorter-route (usually between Vancouver, B.C. and Eugene, Oregon; currently only between Seattle and Eugene) Amtrak Cascades in the morning was by far the most pleasant. It was less crowded and far more quiet—likely due to its early morning departure—and I got a seat next to the window, all of which made it a lot easier to view and appreciate the passing scenery.
I did bring my library book, and I totally operated under the assumption that I would get a lot of it read through about seven cumulative hours of train riding. But, getting information I needed for details on the three separate social media posts about trains I had ridden took kind of surprisingly significant time, so there was a lot of looking stuff up on my phone. But, there was also a lot of just watching the passing scenery and taking pictures. And during both Amtrak train rides, I took naps—a bit longer on the way down, as I had gotten up so early and was a bit tired.
When it came to the Amtrak trains, I preferred to wait until I was at the destination so I could include photos of the train stations at both ends. And once I reached Union Station, I went straight to the nearest MAX Light Rail station so I could head out to The Grotto as quickly as possible. I finished up my
posts about the Amtrak Cascades while riding the MAX light rail—though that also took some time, as I was distracted both by taking photos of the light rail trains, and discovering that in my rush to get on the light rail train that pulled up just a minute after I arrived was actually the Yellow Line when I needed the Green. I even asked a lady on the train which line I was on; I figured out on the map that I could switch to the Green a block away from the next stop—I'd have had to backtrack a lot more had I stayed on even one more stop.
The second stop, the first after the train crossed the Willamette River to east, was where I got photos of the actual Green Line train that I got on (that great shot, even with the bit of garbage on the ground, of the train at the stop near Union Station, was of the Yellow Line train; I just didn't realize it when I took the picture). I got a nice video clip of the Green Line train pulling into the stop.
I do feel like I've gotten pretty adept at figuring out public transit in other cities I visit—especially ones with a robust transit system, which Portland does. Their light rail system has been operational since 1986, and the trains they use feel like they've been in use since then (my local Link Light Rail trains are much nicer), but they get you to where you need to go. Portland also has a streetcar system and plenty of buses. I really need to get out of my head about focusing on downtown, as Portland's downtown just isn't that exciting compared to that of other cities, but it has plenty of cool things to see outside the center of the city which can be easily accessed via transit—like The Grotto. Still, I will be eager to go back once the covid restriction on the Portland Aerial Tram has been lifted; still only people going to the medical center it lifts to can ride it, and I have wanted for years to ride it. It's just that the two times I've been to Portland since I first learned about have been during the pandemic. It offers spectacular skyline views and I want to see them!
Anyway. There are multiple ways to get to The Grotto from downtown via transit, and there's even a single bus that's nearly a straight shot out there. This still depends on timing, though, and depending on how soon the next bus or train is leaving, it can be slightly faster to take the MAX Green Line to a spot about a mile away and then transfer to a bus. I deliberately took the latter choice just so I'd get to ride a MAX train. I wound up kind of wasting $2.50, because they have readers that let you just tap your phone and pay with Apple Pay, which I did before getting on that first, wrong MAX train. I just had no idea how I would then prove I had paid the fare, unless you just show your Apple Wallet transaction to someone? I didn't want to be doing this with every transit ride, so when I got to the MAX station where I transferred to a bus, this time I found a kiosk where I could buy a $5 day pass on a paper ticket. I then used that on the bus I transferred to out to The Grotto; the bus I took back from there to 82n Street & Sandy MAX station; the MAX Green Line I took back to downtown; and later, after talking a walk through downtown to kill time while my return train was increasingly delayed, on another Green Line train again back to Union Station.
I took
one shot after getting off that train, which is the only one with crossover inclusion among two of the separated photo albums for the day: it's in both the Amtrak album and in the MAX Light Rail album, because it shows both a MAX train and Union Station that Amtrak uses.
When I was done at The Grotto, where I spent roughly an hour, I found the one picnic table that was sheltered by an overhanging rooftop to a gift shop building—it rained the entire time I was there, making me exceedingly grateful for my last-minute decision to bring my umbrella with me—and ate the picnic lunch I had brought with me there, at about 1:00. It was there that I got all the photos I wanted to use, and the details I wanted to share, together for my
social media posts about Max Light Rail, and it being kind of a last-minute train addition to my week. I'll be joyriding Link Light Rail with Alexia today, so this week will include two different cities' light rail systems! (If I had been thinking, I would have sought out a ride on the Portland Streetcar too; oh well.) Again, this took me a while, probably more than half an hour, which was fine as I had time to kill anyway.
All the train rides aside, I cannot deny that The Grotto, otherwise known as "
The National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother, was the highlight of the day—I mean, of those 105 shots I keep talking about having taken just yesterday,
51 one of them were taken just at this place.
And although I knew from looking it up after Ivan had been there that it's religiously affiliated, it also slightly gave me pause when I walked the half-mile from the bus stop to the entrance to this place and saw
its huge sign advertising
A Place of Solitude, Peace, and Prayer, plus
Christian Books, Inspirational Gifts. It also says
Visitors Welcome, and I kind of wondered what they would make of someone who looked like me. Well, as per usual, no one reacted to me any differently than they did anyone else, although I didn't come across a lot of people: just the young man I purchased the ticket to the Upper Garden from in the Visitor Center, and maybe a total of five other people I saw also walking the gardens—the rain, plus it being midday on a weekday, likely contributing to the small numbers. For me, the rain actually contributed beautifully to the serenity of the place.
My interest had been piqued mostly by one of the photos Ivan had posted, of a high-cliff overlook from an indoor space. The view is mostly trees rather than of the city (thought you can also see the Portland International Airport in the distance), but I remain a sucker for high views regardless. After walking through the smaller, lower gardens you can see for free and then traversing the rest of the Upper Garden first (which you take a pretty awesome
120' elevator to get to), kind of by accident I finally found the "Meditation Chapel and Viewpoint" as my last stop—which proved to be perfect.
It was totally empty when I got to it, a very large, kind of cavernous space, with four plush chairs you can sit in but also benches along the wall behind them, both warm and dry and a perfect refuse from the chilly and wet (although it really wasn't that bad) weather outside. I took several pictures in there, but also just sat quietly for a while; I could have just sat in there for much longer than I did, but knew I should get moving. Two other people came in while I was there, and they were very quiet as well. It felt like a space in which you might actually meditate just because you couldn't help yourself.
I'd have loved to eat my sandwich in there, it was so nice and dry and warm, but suspected it would be thought of as inappropriate, so I didn't. When I left and went back down the elevator, I searched for a spot where I could get an exterior shot of that "lookout" Meditation Chapel atop the cliff from below, which I finally managed to get by leaving the grounds
and crossing the street. Then, I found the aforementioned picnic table so sit at and eat my lunch, which I found by re-entering the grounds from the back exit I found, and retracing my steps to this gift shop much closer to the street entrance, which is a ways from the Visitor Center, a pretty large church, and the elevator going up the cliff right next to it.
Exactly
how The Grotto is religiously affiliated was kind of hard for me to decipher; clearly it's Catholic, but the website says it's "
a ministry of Servite friars," whatever those are. Wikipedia says it's "
one of five original Catholic mendicant orders," founded in 1233. So what the hell does "mendicant" mean? I was brought up fundamentalist Baptist and even we thought Catholics were all going to hell . . . I've never known the first thing about the intricate details of Catholic church organization. Okay, so what does
Wikipedia say about "mendicant orders," then? They are "primarily certain Christian religious orders that have adopted a lifestyle of poverty, traveling, and living in urban areas for purposes of preaching, evangelization, and ministry, especially to the poor."
I never saw any actual ministry people at The Grotto, mind you, which is clearly largely a tourist attraction whose upkeep has to necessitate a lot of money, so I'm not really sure how all that gets reconciled. There is
this history of the place, told more briefly on the map brochure I was given at the Visitor Center, telling the tale of "bargaining" by a young boy who promised God he would "undertake a great work for the Church" if his very sick mother survived—and she did. Apparently when he grew up, this guy from Ontario, Canada was "sent by his Servite superiors" to the Archdiocese in Portland, where he found some acreage for sale in 1923, turned it into the Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother in 1924, and The Grotto was designated a National Sanctuary in 1983.
Christian or not—and it should be noted, I am not just atheist but pretty vehemently anti-Christian as a concept (which is not the same thing as being "anti Christians"; people can do whatever they want as long as they're not trying to force it upon me)—I found it really cool how inclusive the place was, with shrines from many different countries. I even texted Tracy, who is half Filipino, my photos of the "Dambana"
Filipino shrine. I didn't even think to look for an Indian one, although now that I think about it that might be less likely given that India is 80% Hindu. They still have Christians there, of course; I didn't pay close attention to every single one of the many shrines there.
In fact, at first I started to think this place wouldn't be as interesting to me, as it was more focused on shrines and statues of saints than on being a garden—or so I thought, until I walked a bit further into the Upper Gardens and found how much of it was truly beautiful. I did find the tiny "
Saint Anne's Chapel" to be particularly adorable, with its just four tiny pews inside, which I had to
get a selfie of myself sitting in—I went to church! This was another moment when it was convenient no one else was around; I kept looking around for security cameras to see if anyone could see me misbehaving. (This is pretty tame in terms of "misbehaving," I would argue.) When I later posted
about my visit to The Grotto, Gina commented on how amazing the place looks, but later noted that she only briefly thought about how cool it would be to get married in that tiny little church, then realizing she would never be able to—because she is gay, and it is Catholic.
This is where it sort of gets tricky, because I paid $10 to visit a place maintained by a church organization that continues to discriminate and oppress, many groups but particularly women and gay people. This is the kind of thing Shobhit wouldn't like, such as when we went to see
The Book of Mormon and it was clear how the church was getting "in on the joke" as a recruitment tool. If nothing else, I'll say this about The Grotto: there was absolutely nothing preachy about it, no element whatsoever of recruitment. It was a place for people who already happen to be Catholic to meditate or pray or light
prayer candles, but also a place people of any other faith (or no faith at all) to visit without any interference regarding their own beliefs. So that was cool, at least. I'd still recommend anyone with an interest in gardens to visit any time they are in Portland; to me, it feels like a hidden gem.
Especially the Meditation Chapel and Viewpoint.
Anyway, I did sneak two shots of rum into the Zevia Cherry Cola I brought as a drink with my picnic lunch, so I amused myself with that. Don't tell Mary! As long as you don't tell her, she won't blab to Jesus, right? Also: I
took a picture of my picnic lunch, without realizing the open flap on my shoulder bag left, like, three condoms clearly visible, all of them from Steamworks, my local bathhouse here in Seattle. I think I had put those in there for my trip to Louisville, I don't know, "just in case," even though hookups outside of bathhouses literally never happen for me. In any case, I figured it best not to include that shot in any of my social media posts. Clearly I'm fine linking to it here, though. I should put those back in the drawer next to my bed.
As I said before, I spent a good amount of time constructing my social media post about the MAX Light Rail while I was at that table. There was a bathroom right next to that spot so I used that before leaving, which was smart after just drinking a spiked can of soda; as often happens in that situation, I had to pee really badly again within another twenty minutes or so. Luckily I had 13 minutes until the next Light Rail train after I took the bus back there from The Grotto, and found a bathroom inside a Comfort Inn a block from there. I had to climb stairs from the train platform back up to the street, go to the hotel, barely get inside thanks to a guy also coming out, find a bathroom, then come back and
down the stairs to the platform again, still with about four minutes to spare before the train I took back downtown arrived.
The Coast Starlight Amtrak train, which comes all the way from Los Angeles and is both slower and plagued with delays, was already two hours delayed by the time I got back downtown. It was scheduled to leave at 3:56, and I was back to Union Station by then even after taking a walk south through downtown, including a
stop at Voodoo Doughnut, just to save time—I still hopped a MAX train back to the station. I then just hung around Union Station for the next two and a half hours, constantly checking on the status of the train, and getting annoyed by how frequently its estimated arrival and departure times changed to a few minutes later.
While the convenience store in Union Station was still open, I decided to buy a postcard for Valerie, in honor of her mom, Auntie Rose, as we used to send each other postcards a lot on our travels. I figured, why not? I even found a postcard with three different types of Portland trains on it! I wrote the note on that while standing at an abandoned counter, killing maybe ten minutes there, and getting pleasantly surprised to find a public mail box right outside the entrance. I just wish I had taken a picture of it before mailing it; I meant to and then I spaced it. Oh well, I guess this will be just a special thing between Valerie and me. I don't have to have a photo memento of every single thing.
Speaking of which, I did also bring some paper and pens I used to make Sherri's Mother's Day card on the train ride down in the morning, knowing I would not find the time to do it any other time. I was really concerned about getting it in the mail yesterday too, which will now be postmarked from Oregon—only to realize, I'm such an idiot, I'm meeting Dad tomorrow for our bike ride and I could have just given it to her in person! Oh, well. I still needed the train ride time to do all the drawing.
I spent a pretty long time just standing next to an outlet in the wall, my nearly drained phone charging. I had to move when people formed a line for a different train. The same thing happened when my train arrived, which proved pointless as once we could finally board, everyone just kind of rushed the gate anyway.
My train finally pulled in at 6:06. It left at 6:27, on a train that was supposed to leave at 3:56. The next Cascades train, coming up from Eugene, was less than an hour behind us at that point. That said, my train made pretty good time, without any further delays, the rest of its route to Seattle; the scheduled duration of the ride was three hours and 55 minutes; the ride actually took us three hours and 28 minutes. They really rushed through the stops between Portland and Seattle, at Vancouver Washington; Kelso; Centralia; Olympia and Tacoma.
The ride back was nowhere near as pleasant as I wanted it to be. I had deliberately booked the Coast Starlight for multiple reasons, not least of which is it's a different train from the Cascades, thereby adding to my week's train count. Plus, it's a larger train, with two levels and thus higher seats and better vantage points for passing scenery. It also has the "sightseer car," which I actually sat in for most of the trip—mostly because, being already largely full, I got issued an aisle seat on the east-facing side of the train. I was bound to get better pictures from the sightseeer car, although I didn't take a whole lot in the end. That car had like three older guys in it who talked really loudly, even in the middle of an Amtrak employee who spoke on a microphone about a lot of the passing scenery. One of the guys constantly interrupted him, the Amtrak employee just doing his best to keep talking as though he couldn't hear him.
All three of those older guys, though, were annoying, the kinds of older men who love nothing more than just to hear themselves talk. One of them really reminded me of Grandpa McQuilkin, the way he spoke and the way he gestured, with supreme confidence even though he was clearly talking out his ass.
Also, being so much delayed, I needed something to eat. The dinner Shobhit had prepared got thrown out as he had no idea what element of it had given him food poisoning. The guy working the snack bar downtown in the lounge car was on a one-hour break, though, so I had to wait for that to end and then stand in a tightly packed line, just to get a small cheese pizza and a hot chocolate that cost way more than they were worth. And here I thought I'd be saving money on dinner last night. Oh well; fifteen bucks still isn't going to break me.
They closed the sightseeer car after Tacoma, so just before reaching there, I finally went back to my assigned seat, in the last car of the train. I waited to
post about this train ride until we got to King Street Station in Seattle, as I hoped to get a photo of the train from the front; I was only able to get one from the back before boarding in Portland. I did walk all the way to the front after getting off the train, ignoring a guy hollering after me until I got a
shot of most of the train—the front of the front engine was too far forward, barely under the tunnel north of the station, so I couldn't get it all within the shot. I also rushed it so the shot turned out a little blurry, which was disappointing.
Shobhit, having called out of work, came to pick me up, which was nice. It was right about 10:00. He took me home and I immediately set to getting photos imported to my computer, which I already noted was plagued by glitches and so it was nearly 1:00 this morning by the time I got to bed. I've now taken so long just to write this post this morning that Shobhit marveled more than once how long it was taking me, before he left for today's work shift which started at 11:00. It'll be just past noon before I am finally showered and ready for the day.
Still, it was all worth it! I had a really good time yesterday.
[posted 11:20 am]
