On travelling solo and adventures in the Pacific Northwest

I’m in Eugene OR, waiting on a train to San Francisco. The visa is nearly up so I’m spending the last thirty days of it sightseeing. I began with the two-day train ride from Chicago to Seattle that took me through all sorts of places I’ll likely never see again (North Dakota oil fields, Idaho reservations, Minnesota etc.) and have since been inching my way down through Washington State and Oregon to San Francisco from where myself and Right Honourable Member for California will do some more ill-organized and badly-planned adventuring around that state. My excitement at having company on the next leg of my trip has gotten me wondering how I feel about travelling on my own, and the pros and cons of going solo. But solo or no, every day something wonderful happens and I’m truly blessed (peak Yank) that I get to do, see or hear it. And the Pacific Northwest is a pretty good place to do it!  

Now, there is a very limited amount of boo-hoo-poor-me one can do in their post about having a lovely time travelling the length and breadth of America but it can be a bit lonely sometimes. I’ve arrived at Amtrak and Greyhound stations with a face on me because I’ve to trek across town with the rucksack again to find the damn hostel, knowing that if I was with someone they could just figure it out – I cannot overstate how much of a leper I am with maps and map-reading, even the apparently idiot-proof Google Maps. Sometimes sunsets just aren’t as pretty without someone to nudge and share them with. But the flipside of that is getting to do whatever the hell I want and ‘whatever the hell I want’ is leisurely morning coffee with the Irish Times crossword (Simplex), every inch of every museum and hours of rambling around. I enjoy visiting each state’s capitol building as it always gives me a great sense of how that state’s citizens see themselves and their state. I’ve visited twelve of them so far and, like the two-day train rides, the list of people willing to trek to Salem OR or Olympia Wash. for an hour-long tour is pretty short!

By far, the best thing about travelling alone are the moments of absolute bliss that I experience; at least once a day something wonderful happens. My heart swelled seeing the city skyline by night on a ferry back to Seattle, peering down into the gorges of the Cascade Mountains from the train window, browsing the world’s largest independent bookstore, eating in Portland the best sandwich I’ve ever had, having the restored cinema to myself watching 1917 in Eugene and seeing the Georgia O’Keefe’s at the Portland Art Museum. My heart either swelled – or it might’ve just stopped – when I stepped out to stretch my legs in Minot, North Dakota and experienced -28 cold! I joined a tour of Washington’s State Capitol and ended up on tour with their equivalent of Roses of Tralee. I was looking for a sculpture park and found an Elizabeth Warren rally and met her! Passing through the magnificent Cascade mountains with their single-track hair-pin bends, Douglas firs taller than churches and snow-capped peaks was extra-special because if the train had been on-time, we’d have passed them in the dark and seen nothing. And of course, there’s the people that I probably wouldn’t strike up conversations with if I wasn’t on my own; the dairy farmer from Minnesota who milks twenty thousand cattle that have never seen the sun, the retired train driver who pointed out the reservation he grew up on and told me about life there, the young man just back from deployment in Iraq, the German au pair who had driven her host family’s removal truck from New York to Utah. Such incidents aren’t necessarily remarkable, but when it’s just me, I’m really alive to them, appreciative of them, aware of them, and I find myself savouring each moment of them. Experiencing and recognising joy is a lovely thing.

The Pacific Northwest is the top left-hand corner of the USA, with Canada to the north, the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Cascade Mountains to the east. It’s pretty much Washington State, Oregon and Idaho and its major urban centers are Seattle and Portland. What’s striking about these states is the newness of their history; Oregon became a state in 1859 and Washington not until 1889, and they’re still on the first draft of their histories, namely the pioneering version that lauds intrepidness but often overlooks the whole forceful-removal-off-ancestral-lands-so-white-people-could-have-them. Oregon’s state capitol was only built in 1938 and its murals are all stories of the white man’s arrival; an actual gold statue of a pioneer sits atop of its rotunda. But the pioneering story bears itself out in other ways and places like Seattle, Portland and Eugene have a real liberal vibe to them and attract thousands of Americans hungry for some of that Pacific Northwest lifestyle. And a train ride will show you why; the scenery here is second to none. The trains run alongside the magnificent Colombia River, from Seattle’s piers I saw the sun set over the snow-capped Olympia Mountains, and it’s rare there aren’t mountains in sight. However, despite the wealth that one might assume Microsoft, Amazon and all those techies bring to places like Portland and Seattle, homelessness in those places is astonishing; there are encampments and makeshift tents all over the place, people sleeping in doorways and so many people on the streets who really need care, which is your weekly reminder of the mahoosive inequality that exists in the world’s wealthiest nation.

I’m writing this from the overnight train to San Francisco, from where the second part of this particular adventure begins. The Right Honourable Member for California and I are renting a car to drive down the Pacific coast and over to Death Valley and Yosemite National Parks. We’ve no plan made yet but sure we’ll figure it out along the way. I’ll be glad of the company but right now, I’m feeling pretty good because though there are occasional downsides to travelling solo, no money can buy the sense of empowerment and pride at making my own adventures happen.

Like a pioneer you might say.

But without the stealing land off people.