Seattle to Portland via the #503 Amtrak Cascades, 3 hours, 25 minutes
The Amtrak Cooler 2.1 is packed with food and ready for an adventure. My cooler and I will head south to San Diego, with overnight stops in San Luis Obispo and San Clemente. We will then backtrack to Los Angeles and take the Texas Eagle to Chicago, with overnight stops in the Texas towns of Alpine and Austin. From Chicago we head back home on the Empire Builder, with a twenty-four hour stop in Moorhead MN. The cooler is jam-packed with fresh salad fixings, cheese, nuts, canned chicken and tuna. There is also home-baked bread, tangerines and apples. I got the apples for free by taking a short hike to the Piper’s Orchard within the boundaries of Carkeek Park.
Piper’s Orchard dates back to the 1890s. Andrew Piper and his wife, Wilhelmina, moved to Seattle in 1873 and operated a confectionary and bakery until 1889 when the Great Seattle Fire burned it to the ground. Fortunately for the Pipers, the year before the fire they homesteaded an abandoned logging camp north of Ballard and this gave them an opportunity to reinvent themselves. Getting back to their roots (he was a Socialist member of the city council) they created a utopian, back-to-the-earth homestead farm and orchard, transporting their goods to market by horse and wagon. The City of Seattle purchased the land from Andrew and Wilhelmina’s heirs in 1927 to be part of Carkeek Park. With the farm no longer in operation, the orchard quickly became enveloped in vegetation and was lost to memory. In the early 1980s a landscape architect hired by the City was surveying the park to develop a master plan. Traipsing up a steep slope above Piper’s Creek she came across something that seemed out of place. “Oh, that’s an apple tree!” She and a crew of volunteers began clearing away the vegetation and realized that this tree was part of an orchard of apples, pears and nut trees. The orchard has been lovingly maintained ever since then.
Mary drops me off at King Street Station at 6:00am. I will be taking Amtrak’s new Airo train. It is getting its debut on this route but will eventually be used throughout the Northeast Corridor and other state-supported routes like the Amtrak Cascades line. The original plan was to take it to Eugene, but due to track maintenance work, everyone will get off in Portland and then transfer to a bus for the final leg of the journey. I board the train and am relieved to see that there is plenty of room for my luggage. The seats are comfy, the windows big and bathrooms commodious. One more plus; the WIFI actually works! The train leaves on time, but stops after only five minutes. Over the PA system I hear “Um, we are having a minor problem with the headlights. Only one of the three are working, and by law, this limits our speed. We are going to back up to a place where we can turn the train around. The headlights at the other end are working fine.” Just like Seattle’s car ferries, the train has two “front ends”. At Tacoma Station a man gets on with his skateboard and sits across from me. He is heading home to Portland and is on this Amtrak line for the same reason I am; to check out this new Airo train.
Portland to Eugene via Amtrak Connecting Bus, 2 hours, 40 minutes
To Be Continued
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