Portland was a short train ride (4 hours) south. Portland is a small place in itself and only took the afternoon to look around most of the town. We left Portland wondering if the majority of people living here suffered some sort of sexual obsession as there seemed to be a sex shop/club on every corner.
There was a limited choice of hostels so we had to book into a hosteling international. We have come to avoid these hostels as they only have big dorm rooms sleeping anywhere between 16 to 20. This hostel was no exception with about 16 in our dorm. If you count the bed bugs that were resident in Shaun's bed it would probably take it over 100! After sleeping here for two nights Shaun was absolutely covered in bites!
We decided to hire a car for a day to get out of the city and explore Mount Saint Helen's and the Columbia River Gorge. It was well worth the 500 miles that we managed to rack up
by the time we got back to the hostel. The scenery was breath taking and one of the
waterfalls that we went to visit was over 200m tall.
We left Portland on 2nd October and caught a train to San Francisco. This was another over nighter and took a total of 17 hours.
