McMinnville, Newport, and Portland (Journal Included)

Left at 9:30 a.m. No problems checking in at Southwest at BWI. Very short wait for the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint.

The flight from BWI to Salt Lake City was about 4 ½ hours. We found out that the seats in front of the exit rows don’t recline. There was a youth lacrosse camp on the plane and the three teenagers in front of us kept reclining the seats and putting them up, again and again. Plus, it was an older plane and the seats were spent and quite uncomfortable. I’m glad I was reading a good book to take my mind off the situation. As you go in to SLC from the east, the mountains are to the right and the city is to the left. The salt lake was quite a sight. It’s different colors of greens, pinks, and white.

We had a long layover in SLC, so we ate at a restaurant near the end of terminal B. The view of the mountains from the windows was quite nice. We split a turkey club and chips among the three of us and it was plenty of food. The prices were reasonable.

FYI, there is a really nice children’s play area at the top of terminal B.

We got to Portland around 6:30 p.m. and got our luggage fairly quickly. We had to take a shuttle to get to Alamo for our rental car. We got the car and were about ready to go when Dad realized it only had half a tank of gas. I went back in to the office and the guy said he would get more gas. I recognized that he was the only one working the desk at the time, so I quickly suggested, as nicely as I could, “Maybe you could give us a free upgrade?” He paused and didn’t really seem to want to do it, but he said, “Yeah. Go ahead and take one from the next row over.” So, we switched from a Ford Focus to a Pontiac G6. We were displeased to find that it had lots of awful, very persistent soap spots all over the windows, but we didn’t want to switch a third time, so we took it.

The drive to McMinnville took one and a half hours and we were driving in to the sun most of the time. The soap scum over the windows made us nearly blind; the windshield washer fluid wasn’t helpful. Luckily, traffic wasn’t bad at all. It was 9 p.m. when we arrived at the hotel on the edge of McMinnville. We were exhausted and didn’t feel up to driving in to the middle of town, so we ended up getting dinner at the McDonald’s, which is right next to the hotel. We had a family suite-style room, which was very nice. Unfortunately, it sounded like there was a toddler running laps in the room above us, but the sound stopped soon enough and we all seemed to fall asleep quickly.

Customized Google Map