Seattle to San Francisco

I know you all are waiting on the edge of your seats to see how Kevin and I made our way from Seattle to San Francisco.  Well, maybe you're not, but in the interest of completing over sharing every detail of our trip, here it goes.

After our little adventure in Seattle, I drove four hours from Seattle to Union Pacific's diesel locomotive shop in Hermiston, Oregon.  Do you recognize my ugly sunglasses?  They are the same ones I bought when we were down at the Big 12 Championship Game this winter.  How do I always manage to hang on to the cheap sunglasses, but as soon as I buy nice ones I immediately lose or destroy them? 

Here was my route:

The drive was beautiful.  Everything from green mountains, to deserts, to wavy green hills like this one.  I normally hate driving, but the scenary was so cool that I didn't even mind it.  Towards the end of the trip, I even thought to take a video. 

Drive from Amanda Kohler on Vimeo.

On Tuesday night the locomotive shop director took my co-worker and I to a restaurant called Cedars in the Tri-Cities area of Oregon.  Here's a snapshot I took of the Columbia River right outside the restaurant.

On Wednesday morning I flew from Pasco, Oregon to San Francisco, California.  Then we took our connecting flight from San Francisco to Sacramento.  San Francisco and Sacramento are only 2 hours driving distance apart so you can imagine how small the plane was...

Here she is.  By far the smallest plane I've ever flown on.  Definitely had less than 20 seats.

I of course was the lucky traveler that got to sit right next to the propeller.  Since I've never flown on a prop plane like this, at first I was excited... until the propeller caused my entire seat to vibrate and my butt fell asleep.

Instead of flying from Washington to Oregon, throughout the week Kevin drove over 13 hours, stopping all along the way to look at Union Pacific property. 

From what he tells me, the drive was mostly very nice.

That is, until he ran into snowy weather when he got up in the mountains in Northern California.  At some point the highway patroll wouldn't let anyone pass without chains on their tires.  Of course he was in a rental car and didn't have any  chains so he had to drive into a nearby town (Weed, CA, of all places) and buy and install them.  What a fun little surprise. 


Here's a snapshot he took with his Android phone.  Pretty cool picture huh? 



On Friday, we finally both made it safely to Sacramento and started our road trip to San Francisco.  To be continued...