Seattle: Day 6 -- Portland: Day 1 The Amazing Race

Seattle was not the only city to draw us to the Northwest. Leslie's cousin, the maid of honor at our wedding, lives in Portland and has been asking us for a decade to come and visit, so this was our chance. Originally we had planned on renting a car for the three-hour drive south, but instead we decided to take the train, realizing that it would be only marginally more expensive but infinitely more relaxing. Feeling confident in my grasp of the Seattle public transit system, I turned down an offered ride to the train station and instead used my iPhone's Map application to plot our course. (This is called foreshadowing.) Our train was scheduled to leave at 9:45 AM, so we left the house in time to catch an 8:54 bus that would get us to the station with time to spare. When we got off the bus a few minutes later it took about twenty seconds to realize we had gotten off at the wrong stop -- and the bus was gone. There are lots of things I could've done differently to have prevented this, but the only thing that really mattered was that our train was due to leave in thirty minutes and we were 1.2 miles from the station. What followed was a scene straight out of The Amazing Race. Each of us, including the kids, was wearing a full backpack,but we had no choice but to run. I picked up Kate, asked her to hold tight to my neck, and we took off. To be honest, we weren't sprinting; it would be more accurate to say that we ran, then shuffled, then walked, then ran again, all the while hoping for a taxi or another bus to come along and rescue us. Nothing. As we turned down the home stretch and the station finally came into sight, I heard a scream behind me and turned to see that Henry had fallen and collapsed into a heap. I kept running, leaving Leslie to pick up the pieces. Kate and I ran through the train station doors and up to the ticket counter at 9:44. With sweat dripping down my face and my breath coming in angry bursts, I asked if we had any chance at making the 9:45 train. "No." "How much did we miss it by?" "One minute." "When is the next train?" "Two twenty." Totally defeated, we sat for a few minutes on the wooden benches in the station, catching our breath and tending to Henry's bloody knee. Even though we now knew we would not be the best contestants on The Amazing Race, it turned out not to be a total loss. With four hours to kill, we ate a long, leisurely breakfast at McCoy's Firehouse Cafe (recommended by a helpful group of firemen), discovered a hidden waterfall park in the middle of downtown, and spent two hours exploring the Klondike Gold Rush National Park. Soon enough we were on our train and heading south to Portland, zipping through the beautiful scenery of the Pacific Northwest.