Prince Edward Island has moved to a system of having driver’s licenses produced by an off-Island company (historically they were produced in-house at the Access PEI site, while you waited).

The change has resulted in a bizarre new effect that the clerk at Access PEI referred to as “everybody looks like they have a beard.”

Here’s my last driver’s license photo, on the license that expires next week:

Here’s my new driver’s license photo, on the license that arrived by mail last week:

Not only does the new photo indeed make me look like I have a beard, but it also makes me look pale and, dare I say, cadaverous.

Which, according to Access PEI, is perfect acceptable.

In an Orwellian move earlier this year, the government, under the aegis of its “Climate Action Plan,” made driver’s licenses free for Islanders. I have been unable to square how making it more affordable to drive relates to climate change action.

Vicki Pipe and Geoff Marshall, who visited every railway station in England, Scotland and Wales in 2017, are back this week with All the Stations–Ireland.

Episode One is online now; it covers their crossing from England to Ireland on the ferry.

The shrouded exoskeleton of Province House, lit from within.

Powell’s Books in Portland lived up to its reputation as an excellent independent bookstore. I only had a short time to browse its stacks, but I quickly found four interesting books to bring home with me.

Oliver and I finished up our March school break trip to the west coast last night, arriving home just before midnight on the flight from Montreal.

While I posted some updates from the road, here I’ll sum up some of the highlights, longitudinally rather than chronologically. Think of it as a sort of “best of” listing.

Coffee

Deadstock in Portland was my favourite. Close in spirit and topography to the old ROW 142, the coffee was excellent and the vibe true to its “snob-free” tag line.

I also liked 49th Parallel in Vancouver, Victrola in Seattle, and Blackbird Bakery on Bainbridge Island.

Art

Hands down favourite was Le Montréaler, un homage au New Yorker, mounted in the underground walkway at Trudeau Airport that connects the main terminal to the satellite one. It was lovely to see the ubiquitous HSBC airport ads removed (at least mostly) in favour of a whimsical series of covers for an imagined magazine. Who ever thought that the transit to the barren wasteland of the Trudeau remote terminal could be so pleasant.

Runner up was the collection of art on the walls of Oregon Health Sciences University, a collection described as being “intended to enhance the healing experience for our patients and their families.”

Hotels

I’ve become a fan of Tablet Hotels, a curated hotel booking engine that maps to my aesthetic. We booked our stays at The Burrard in Vancouver and Palihotel in Seattle through Tablet, and the descriptions there matched what was inside the tin.

My favourite hotel, however, was The Society Hotel in Portland, which I booked directly. Located in Old Town, the hotel had a simple, well-designed room with a king bed and a fold-down IKEA sofa and a set of simple plywood and metal accessories. The lobby sported a solid café, and the beautiful, sunny, warm weather meant that we got to enjoy their rooftop deck in a way that a trip a month earlier wouldn’t have allowed. The hotel was convenient to a waterfront park (for walking Ethan), and handy to public transit. I would certainly stay there again.

Honourable mention goes to the Fairmont Vancouver Airport, which will likely be the most per hour I ever spend on a hotel room. But it was worth it to stay at the airport and thus avoid the stress of an earlier wake-up and morning commute (we do everything we can to reduce airport stress). The room was suitably ostentatious, with louvered doors between the bedroom and the bathroom, futuristic controls for the lights, very, very comfortable beds and a stunning view of the runway and Vancouver Island beyond.

Transportation

Awards must go to the Air Canada Special Services Desk at Vancouver Airport, and especially to agent Monica, for getting us checked in and accompanying us to security, clearing a path for us through the chaos. Truly exceptional service (that I’ve been sure to let Air Canada know about). Behind the scenes, Martine at the Air Canada Medical Desk performed miracles in helping rebook us around the Boeing 737 MAX groundings, which was also much-appreciated.

We traveled Amtrak four times: Vancouver-Seattle, Seattle-Portland, Portland-Seattle and Seattle-Vancouver. I love travel by rail, and this was no exception. The highlight was the business class segment we took from Portland to Seattle (business class only because the fare difference was negligible); this afforded us access to the lounge in Portland and slightly more room on the train. Amtrak staff on all segments were universally helpful in getting us set up with seats that would best accommodate Ethan the Dog.

Special Amtrak Award must go to Marty in the Lost & Found office at King Street Station in Seattle who located Oliver’s lost wallet, and tracked him down via his Dog Guides ID card.

The vegan burger sold in the on-board snack bar also deserves a thumbs up; it’s unusual to find non-meat options on trains, and it was a pretty good burger to boot.

Public Transit

We took public transit in all three cities we visited.

The easiest to manage was Portland, mostly because the HOP card was easy to purchase, easy to use, and had a simple $5/day maximum fare. Portland also supported payment with Google Pay via NFC, but this didn’t appear to support multiple passengers, so we didn’t get a chance to try it out.

Seattle’s ORCA card was similarly easy to use, but had a $5 up-front cost, and a more complicated fare structure.

Our experience in Vancouver was limited to the Canada Line, which runs from Vancouver Airport into the city. This was the only system of the three that used fare gates (Portland and Seattle are both honour-based systems), which made it more challenging to navigate with son and dog. But it got us downtown in short order.

Portland and Seattle were both blanketed with Lime and Jump dockless electric bicycles. There was no evidence of any allowance toward accessible bicycles, however, and so we were unable to try these out (this is what happens when active transportation infrastructure is left to an under-regulated free market).

Ethan the Dog

We had no troubles at all taking Ethan the Service Dog everywhere we went; only one person asked if he was a service dog, and nobody ever asked for proof.

The only odd occurrence was a security guard at the OSMI museum in Portland who asked us his breed and then put this out over the radio (for reasons unknown).

Ethan himself was a trooper, putting up with our different schedule, our different time zone, and different times for eating and peeing, with aplomb.

Mental Health

Oliver did exceedingly well at navigating the stressful maze of airport security which, due careful planning, we encountered only in Charlottetown and Vancouver.

As has often happened with similar breakthroughs, leveling up brought some new challenges into focus: without the chaotic aftermath of a complete meltdown to obscure things, we didn’t pay enough attention to the aftershocks of that stressful process, and so Oliver got stressed out during the boarding process more than expected. But we’ve talked about ways of mitigating this in future, and I’m hopeful we can keep traveling without this standing in our way.

When we were passing through the airport in Amsterdam last summer, Oliver used a robotic massage chair to help him calm down after security, and passing through Trudeau airport yesterday he spotted a real live human massager in the international terminal, so, with time to spare, we stopped so that he could have a 10 minute massage, which he really enjoyed. So there’s one strategy right there.

Oliver’s working on a list of things that he finds helpful in airports that he can send out to airports to help make them more accessible to more travelers.

I’ve become better at managing my mental health as a carer, and realizing that it’s stressful to support someone who’s anxious, and that my stress can have the unintended consequence of making things worse, not better. That’s one reason why the Strongest Families program, which we all three went through in 2017, was so helpful: it reinforced that we’re all in this life together, and that we all need strategies for coping.

In the end, the only area of human activity where I truly excel is in the organization of impromptu adventures while traveling. And there is no more fertile ground for this skill than the awkward night shoehorned between a late arrival in a new city and a following day of planned activities.

Arriving in Seattle from Portland on the 3:30 p.m. train as we did today was a prime example of this: all other things being equal we could have simply checked into our hotel, found a place to have supper, and then retired early after a day that was sedentary but somehow also exhausting.

But that is not my style.

So here’s what we did instead.

We did, indeed, take a cab to our hotel, a return engagement at the same Palihotel where we stayed on Tuesday night.

After dropping our bags and feeding and watering Ethan the Dog, we walked up the street to the Seattle showroom for the Tuft & Needle mattress-in-a-box company. I am confounded by mattress purchasing, and haunted by the memory of too much time spent in the basement at Leon’s being overwhelmed by choice and unable to get a true sense for how any given mattress will perform under daily use.

The mattress-in-a-box industry has a not unpleasant “we’re shaking things up and taking down Big Mattress” quality to it, but not being able to take their wares for a ride makes it similarly impossible to get a sense of whether their mattresses are actually any good for my body.

Enter the aforementioned showroom, which consists simply of four neo-rooms formed out of semi-transparent gauze, each outfitted with a mattress on which one is free to lay about and, relative to Leon’s et al, simulate day-to-day life. Tuft & Needle doesn’t ship to Canada, so the experiment was moot for our particular purposes, but it was pleasant to see things done differently, and the comfort of their beds gave me some hope that the made-in-Canada equivalent mattresses might work for me.

Thus-sated, we called an Uber and headed for Northwest Film Forum, in Capitol Hill, where I’d secured us tickets for Astra Taylor’s film What is Democracy?, a film that ticked our interests in both documentaries and politics.

We arrived with about an hour to spare, and so looked around the neighbourhood to see what we could see.

Oliver’s eagle eyes spotted a hair salon directly across the street that was, oddly, still open on a Sunday at 6:00 p.m. We poked our head in the door and found that they did, indeed, have a slot available for Oliver. And so he got his hair cut.

Twenty minutes later and freshly-shorn, we went looking for a place to eat and found a Poké Bar just up the street where we enjoyed bowls of rice, fish and seasonings along with iced jasmine tea.

We finished up supper just in time to walk across the street to the cinema, and got two seats in the second row, with a nook for Ethan to curl into right in front of us.

Northwest Film Forum is an interesting institution, equal parts film exhibition space and film school; the promos that ran during the pre-show revealed a collection of screenings and courses that would have made me comfortable renting an apartment nearby and dropping by every day.

What is Democracy?, as the title suggests, is an extended rumination on democracy. It is neither a class in civics nor a polemic, but rather a holding up of the sphere of democracy to the light, through the eyes of everyone from Cornell West to Miami school students to Syrian refugees living on the docks in Greece. It was heady stuff, and made all the more heady by a fellow audience member who started to yell out dissenting views early on and, when shushed by others, became militantly anti-social and was expelled from the theatre while yelling a series of epithets about how we who remained were sheep-like white people being lured into a cult.

The irony of the interruption in the context of the subject matter was not lost, but there was a significant collective sigh of relief when calm returned, as things could have easily gone further sideways.

The film was followed by a brief Q&A with the director, who was engaging and thoughtful.

When it was all done we piled into another Uber and were back in our hotel by 9:45 p.m., ready for bed and anticipating a final day of vacation adventuring in Seattle tomorrow.

Friday morning in Portland we decided that we wanted to experiment with driving a car2go car, and a desire to visit a Best Buy in the suburbs to look at phones presented a conceit.

We’d previously rented car2go cars in Montreal, where the fleet is almost entirely tiny Smart cars; here in Portland, though, they only use full-sized Mercedes, the likes of which my caste doesn’t allow me to drive otherwise, so there was an added bonus. The rental process was painless: find a nearby car on the app (a block from our hotel), tap its icon, enter the code on the car’s dash and, presto, it’s remotely unlocked, with the key in the glove box.

We drove out of central Portland and into the hills, found the Best Buy, decided the phones on offer weren’t worthy, and drove back downtown and across the river to leave the car and go to OMSI, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

The Achilles heel of using a car2go car is that you need to find a place to park it when you’re done. In theory this should be easy, as any legal street parking spot with allowance of more than 2 hours is eligible. But spots near OMSI were in short supply, so we ended up touring the neighbourhood for 15 minutes before we found a spot. This was not for nought, however, as the walk to OMSI then took us by Sushi Mazi, where we stopped for an excellent lunch.

After lunch we walked through a light rain to OMSI, just 10 minutes away. The museum itself proved disappointing: while the temporary exhibit about the making of Pixar films taught us a few new things, the rest of the museum was tired, interesting exhibits were short on the vine, and the whole place was chaotic, as it was filled to the brim with agitated school break campers. We cut our visit a little short, which didn’t hurt too much, as we’d only paid $10 to enter, leveraging Oliver’s Discovery Centre membership, with its reciprocal admission privileges, for our entry, paying only for the Pixar add-on.

From OMSI we took the train one stop across the Tilikum Crossing Bridge to rendezvous with Oliver Baker; Portland’s transit system is Scandinavian-level good, with simple fare structure, easy payment with a tap, and intermodal transfers.

On the other side we had a snack of tacos at Cha Cha Cha, bought some dog food for Ethan from a local joint and then, once Oliver B. arrived,  we rode the gondola that connects the riverside and hilltop parts of the Oregon Health Sciences University campus together; as I’m a fan of gondolas and funiculars, this was lots of fun.

The hillside campus at the top was shiny, modern, and pleasantly art-filled.

After a ride back down to the riverside, we walked back across the bridge and stopped in for a quick visit at the Oregon Rail Heritage Center; our time was limited, as they were about to close, but it was a good visit nonetheless, and we learned a lot about how locomotives work (knowledge that serves me well as I type this post on the train north to Seattle).

We grabbed a snack at Boke Bowl, walked back across the river, and took Oliver’s car to his house for a follow-up snack for humans and dogs.

Our final adventure of the day was a showing of Captain Marvel at the lovely Moreland Theatre, which sported excellent popcorn, loganberry cider, and comfortable seats. Oliver B. dropped us back to our hotel around 11:00 p.m. where we retired to bed almost immediately given our fun-filled program for the day.

The Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks & Minerals is located in a purpose-built ranch-style house west of Portland.

The washroom near the phosphorescence room is a bona fide residential washroom, in resplendent pink, complete with shower, tub, and dual sinks.

And an Automatic Bathroom Ventilator.

Our friend Oliver took this photo of us yesterday as we were walking over the Tilikum Crossing Bridge in Portland.