********************************
Day 1
Getting to the airport was easy. Our flight was pretty early, and traffic that early in the morning is pretty nonexistant so the drive was pretty quick.
Which meant we had plenty of just waiting around at the airport time.
And time for making new friends (this fella's name was "Bear" and he was traveling with a bunch of very sweet girls).
Our plane was the "Larry the Lynx" plane, and feeling myself in the capable paws of Larry, I relaxed and settled in for the flight to the Portland Airport.
I had been looking forward to taking lots of cool "in the air" pictures, but it was a really hazy and cloudy morning. But the clouds were pretty anyway.
From out of the clouds loomed a gigantic mountain (from out of the clouds to the SIDE of the plane, as opposed to in FRONT of the plane. Good job Captain Larry!), which was Mt. Hood. From my previous internet research, I knew that meant we were almost there (okay, so LadyDragonfly told me what the mountain was later, and I knew we were almost there because the flight attendant said so on the PA).
My first view of the Columbia River.
At the airport, they had these huge sculptures that turned in the... air conditioning? Anyway, I saw the windmill and told Wendy "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore". Which she did not find nearly as witty and funny as I did. She's not really a morning person. She even tried to tell me that Larry the Lynx was NOT the pilot of our plane. Silly sleepy human.
So we immediately went out for some much needed coffee, and then we were off to start our big Pacific Northwest adventure... um, with a nap at LadyDragonfly's house.
