Long Day's Travel to Seaside
May. 30th, 2008 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeTo review: I took Friday off from work and flew to Oregon. We are going to the Sea-Pac amateur radio festival in Seaside, Oregon. We try to go to this event every year, partially because Lisa likes browsing all of the vendors and partially because we're fond of Seaside.
Travel today was pretty hassle-free. I caught the train from Fremont/Centerville without incident, AirBART was waiting for me, and checking my luggage was no problem. I even had time to get a breakfast burrito from the airside vendor and to finish it before they called my flight. It was another CRJ700, but tolerable for the 90 minutes or so up to Portland.
Lisa was delayed a while because she was dropping off a birthday present for her friend Scott. Combined with my flight being a few minutes early and luggage taking no time at all to come off the belt, I was earlier than she expected me to be at the Parkrose/Sumner transit center. (As long-time readers know, Lisa hates driving into airports and prefers for me to ride light rail out from the airport several stops. I do wish I'd known she was running late, though, as I would have probably waited at the airport with a coffee and wi-fi instead of hanging around the transit center wondering where she was.
We took our usual route to Seaside, which is north up to Kelso, Washington, then west on WA-4 to the Cathlamet Ferry back over to Oregon, and from there on to Seaside with a stop to pick up groceries. We're staying at the Holiday Inn Express, which means we have a refrigerator and microwave oven. It's also very convenient to the Seaside Convention Center, where we went over and bought our memberships. I gave them $20 and they gave us two blank badges, upon which we wrote our names and call signs. No photo ID or other nonsense required here.
We saw signs for a big spaghetti feed being sponsored by a local group going on that evening at the firehouse a few blocks from the hotel. We walked over there, but when we saw that the queue was out the door and down the block, we decided to go to KFC and get some take-out back to the hotel instead. After a nice chicken dinner, we took a pleasant stroll down the Seaside Promenade and back. On the way back, we detoured over to the site of the run-down little hotel where we always used to stay, requesting the same cottage each year, until year before last when they tore it down and built pricey condo units. We had a look at the building. In fact, we worked about the exact spot where "our" cottage had been -- it's part of the parking lot now. From the looks of things, they've not managed to sell any of the very expensive units. Mind you, there are a lot of for sale signs here in Seaside, which continues to slowly go do seed.
After our nice evening walk, it was back to the hotel for a little party, about which I'll write separately later.
Travel today was pretty hassle-free. I caught the train from Fremont/Centerville without incident, AirBART was waiting for me, and checking my luggage was no problem. I even had time to get a breakfast burrito from the airside vendor and to finish it before they called my flight. It was another CRJ700, but tolerable for the 90 minutes or so up to Portland.
Lisa was delayed a while because she was dropping off a birthday present for her friend Scott. Combined with my flight being a few minutes early and luggage taking no time at all to come off the belt, I was earlier than she expected me to be at the Parkrose/Sumner transit center. (As long-time readers know, Lisa hates driving into airports and prefers for me to ride light rail out from the airport several stops. I do wish I'd known she was running late, though, as I would have probably waited at the airport with a coffee and wi-fi instead of hanging around the transit center wondering where she was.
We took our usual route to Seaside, which is north up to Kelso, Washington, then west on WA-4 to the Cathlamet Ferry back over to Oregon, and from there on to Seaside with a stop to pick up groceries. We're staying at the Holiday Inn Express, which means we have a refrigerator and microwave oven. It's also very convenient to the Seaside Convention Center, where we went over and bought our memberships. I gave them $20 and they gave us two blank badges, upon which we wrote our names and call signs. No photo ID or other nonsense required here.
We saw signs for a big spaghetti feed being sponsored by a local group going on that evening at the firehouse a few blocks from the hotel. We walked over there, but when we saw that the queue was out the door and down the block, we decided to go to KFC and get some take-out back to the hotel instead. After a nice chicken dinner, we took a pleasant stroll down the Seaside Promenade and back. On the way back, we detoured over to the site of the run-down little hotel where we always used to stay, requesting the same cottage each year, until year before last when they tore it down and built pricey condo units. We had a look at the building. In fact, we worked about the exact spot where "our" cottage had been -- it's part of the parking lot now. From the looks of things, they've not managed to sell any of the very expensive units. Mind you, there are a lot of for sale signs here in Seaside, which continues to slowly go do seed.
After our nice evening walk, it was back to the hotel for a little party, about which I'll write separately later.
