Bruce and I have been on an extended vacation on the west coast. We started out in downtown Los Angeles - the historic section which has been nicely renovated. I spent the first morning with my sketchbook in Pershing Square across from the California Jewelry Mart.
Then we headed off to Chinatown,
Little Tokyo,
and El Pueblo, (yes, we walked to all of them). They were all really interesting, but we ended up having lunch at a little outdoor Mexican restaurant. I had sopes - kind of like a tostada, but the base is a fried corn cake.
We stayed in a little boutique hotel (actually a Hilton that Bruce got for free with his frequent flier miles) right behind the Biltmore (which was $400 a night). The cylindrical-shaped building in the background is the US Bank Tower. It claims to be the tallest building west of the Mississippi, but it's only about half the size of the Sears Tower in Chicago. I think the fact that it's sitting on top of "Bunker Hill," the tallest point in downtown L.A., makes it look taller. Unfortunately when we first got off the shuttle bus from the airport, we climbed up and then down Bunker Hill dragging our suitcases behind us, not realizing that it was dead flat only a couple blocks away.
Next we took the Amtrak
Coast Starlight train to Seattle. We got a sleeper car which is Amtrak's equivalent of first class. The sleeper car got us 2 seats in our own little compartment (they folded down into 2 bunks at night), all meals in the dining car, movies in the little theater, and wine tasting parties in the afternoons.
The train started out along the Pacific coast (hence the name),
then we hit the desert around Sacramento,
and the mountains of northern California. The scenery seemed to change constantly, but one thing we rarely saw was a freeway.
We spent the night in downtown Seattle (big temperature change from L.A.), picked up Courtney at the airport, and spent the next night at Brian's.
He and his girlfriend, Amber, made dinner for us (soft tacos) and then we played board games (of course Brian won most of the rounds).
Next we drove to Lake Chelan and took a seaplane up to Stehekin - a small town in the Cascade National Forest. There are no roads into this town, because it is surrounded by mountains. The town is literally one house wide and about 10 miles long.
We did some hiking along the river, though most of the trails went up the side of the mountains. The first trail we took had a 1000 foot elevation change in just a little over a mile (that's pretty steep).
This was the view from the deck off our cabin. I swear I did not Photoshop this picture. It was truly this beautiful. But unfortunately all things must come to an end, and we all scattered to the four winds when we got back to Seattle - Bruce to St Louis, me to Portland, and poor Courtney to Chicago (after a 14-hour saga at the airport).
