Contending With Aggravation and Pictures 9/26 - 9/28

That power outage sure threw a monkey wrench into life. After my arrival home I did my best to get the desktop fired up again. My power strip has a surge protector with a battery back up. That battery back-up is invaluable for the many small outages which occur. When a major lengthy shutdown happens, like the last transformer break, it drains the battery pretty quickly. If you can get power back in a reasonable amount of time the battery easily charges. I’m thinking because I was gone for two weeks after it was drained that is the reason the battery is now dead. That battery is just barely over a year old. Time to order another one from Amazon. They are not that expensive, it is just another thing to contend with. Damn!!

If that were not enough aggravation, I thought it might be easy to down load the pictures from my Mac book to the memory card of my camera, and then just copy those files to my desktop picture files like I’m downloading pictures.

This computer stuff will drive me to distraction. I was able to download the files OK, but could not export those picture files from the folder. I had to go back to the tried and true use of a memory stick to copy from the laptop and then paste to the desk top picture files. I’m sure there is a way around this; it just is not in my range of intelligence!

Finally here are some pictures from the first leg of the trip:

Packing by gas and candle light:

The scorched kitchen cabinet:

View from my Air B&B room in Seattle:

My trusty Labatt Blue Bag on board:

Steve and I on the platform:

We have been coupled onto the back of the Empire Builder and are enroute to the departure track. Once coupled onto the train, we were taken out of the station and then backed onto the departure platform. It was amazing to witness the switches all working as we progressed. Conductor on back overseeing it all.

Pulling out of the Portland Station:

Waiting for barge traffic to pass on the swing bridge:

I loved getting pictures of the tunnel portals as we exited:

This back platform was my home pretty much the entire trip!

I forget the name of the bridge in the background, but it makes a beautiful picture:

Sunset on the Empire Builder 9/27/2016:

Pulling into Whitefish, MT at 7:21 on the 28th. We will be switched to a siding and pick up the next days Empire Builder. If you look close you can see another private car ahead of us. That poor car left a day ahead of us. That train encountered a rock slide. As I understand the passengers were detoured around while that car had to return to Portland. We had priority on being on the back of the train for the 27th. I felt sorry for them, but their view was only blocked for the first hours out before nightfall and we were uncoupled early in the morning giving them an unobstructed view again.