Dave claims our luggage at Seattle's Amtrak station. We had left Jacksonville April 30th for what would be more than a month of traveling across the country by train, ship, plane, bus and automobile. Using the USA Rail Pass our plan was to use many of the 10 segments to travel by train across the country and back.
We arrived May 1st in Philadelphia aboard Amtrak’s Silver Meteor and then traveled by bus to Allentown for a visit with Dave’s mom and sister. This would be a working trip as we helped Dave’s cousins resurface the deck behind his mom’s house.
| | Leaving early Monday morning, (May 5th), the job was undone, but we were on our way west to Seattle, traveling first to NYC by bus and then by train to Chicago on the Lakeshore Ltd. This would be the most problematic leg of the trip, as the connecting train from Boston delayed our departure from Albany by over 2 hours, and caused a cascading failure of the toilets on board. |
| Leaving Chicago on the Empire Builder, we made a 2-day run to Seattle – our 2nd time making this trip by rail. | |
| | Spending a couple days in Seattle, we had time to visit with our friend Gail on one of those days, before boarding the Cascades train north to Vancouver Canada. |
| While in Vancouver, we had a startling discovery that we had misunderstood our USA Rail Pass rules. Instead of expiring 30 days after our first trip on April 30th, it was expiring earlier than we thought on May 16th. This was due to the rule that it had be used 120 days after purchase. Oops. So, we had to rethink the last few weeks of our trip. | |
| | We had traveled to Vancouver to take a short Alaska cruise which would depart from there on May 13th. We had a couple of days to explore Vancouver before we boarded, taking a walking tour of downtown and using our Compass pass to travel by Metro and ferry while there. |
| Shortly after boarding our 4-day Alaska cruise, we came up with a plan to bypass the problems of our rail pass expiring and some complexities of scheduling travel on Memorial Day weekend at the last minute. It was a pretty simple solution. We would stay on board the ship for another week for a longer cruise to Alaska. | |
| | Our embarkation day in Vancouver was sooo much better than that for our transatlantic cruise back in April. We had a very different set of passengers on board as well. |
| Over the course of our cruise to Alaska, we had several days at sea, which kept us watching the water for whales and finding things to do on board the ship. And there was plenty of good food as well. | |
Parting Shots
 |  |
We still had a couple more weeks of travel before returning home to Jacksonville. And thanks to Dave’s cousins, that deck at his mom’s house was completed and looks lovely.
