We’re now officially more than five hours behind schedule… let’s hear it for Amtrak! :) Becky and I are having a great time, though. (Some of our fellow passengers are more upset about the delay, but we planned for its near-inevitability from the get-go.)

Anyway, we should be arriving in Portland sometime between 8:00 and 9:00 PM — right about the time we were scheduled to be in Seattle! Heh. You may be able to watch us via webcam here.

We just left Eugene, Oregon -- home of the Ducks -- now more than 4 1/2 hours late. After a long period of cell-phone silence, we're back to civilization, so I've just learned about the Space Shuttle,
the North Korean missile, and Italy beating Germany.

We're in Klamath Falls, Oregon… and I finally have a cell phone signal. :) Here's a photo from earlier this morning of Mount Shasta in northern California.

First of all… HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!!!

Now then… for any InstaPundit readers who are stopping by this morning, a quick refresher. My wife Becky and I are in the midst of a train trip on Amtrak’s lovely Coast Starlight from L.A. to Seattle, as explained here. I’ll be liveblogging via cell phone throughout the day today. Just scroll down for older posts, and keep visiting my homepage for the latest photos and updates. In addition, you may be able to catch our train on some webcams (all times MST/PDT):

• Dunsmuir, CA, ~6:00 AM or later
• Portland, OR, ~4:30 PM or later
• Olympia, WA (see also here), ~7:00 PM or later
• Seattle, WA (?), ~9:30 PM or later

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, guestblogger Sean Sullivan is at Cape Canaveral, and will be blogging about today’s planned Space Shuttle launch, scheduled for 2:38 PM EDT (that’s 11:38 AM out here on the West Coast). So, stay tuned for that.

Last but not least, if you’re just looking for my Lieberman post, click here.

As promised, Andrew and Bea met us at the Sacramento train station just before 1:00 AM this morning. We only had about 10 minutes to hang out before we had to get back on the train, but it was still very nice to see them — and they made us a Jamba Juice thermos full of sangría for breakfast! LOL! Thanks, A & B. :)

It seems fitting that we ended the two-year anniversary of our engagement by seeing the happy couple for the first time since they got engaged. Speaking of which, we got to see Bea’s ring! Woohoo!

Andrew and Bea are the second pair of friends who have come out to a train station in the dead of night to say hello when my train was just passing through. The first? Vikki and Bridget, on a fateful night in 2003. And by “fateful night,” I mean, “Aaron Boone sucks.”

Anyway… time for bed. See you in the morning.

We left Oakland at 10:56 PM, and just stopped in Martinez as I write this at 11:46 PM, which should put us in Sacramento around 1:00 AM. I don’t know whether Andrew and Bea are still planning to come out to the station and say hi. Either way, I’ll most likely go to sleep after we leave Sacto. (Becky is already sound asleep, though of course I’ll wake her if Andrew and Bea come out to greet us.) [UPDATE, 12:24 AM: I just heard from Andrew by cell phone; they’re on their way to the station. Woohoo!]

If the current schedule holds — never a safe bet with Amtrak — we’ll have a spectacular view of the 14,160-foot Mount Shasta out our window when the sun rises tomorrow. We should be past Redding and Shasta Lake by then, and nearing Dunsmuir, which, at 2,300 feet, is a little less than halfway up to the train’s highest elevation, 5,050 feet. (Hat tip: Lee Groth’s The Milepost and John Pitt’s USA by Rail, our indispensible travel guides for this trip.)

Anyway, here are a few low-light pictures that I took (with my real digital camera, not my camera-phone like all the ones in previous posts) during our stop in Oakland:

The front cars of the train, seen from above.

The Oakland train station.

The front of our train.

More, higher-resolution photos to follow eventually, of course.

UPDATE: Here are a few more pictures that I took (again with my real camera) earlier today:

Becky in the Sightseeing Lounge Car.

The coast of California.

Our train winds along the curves north of San Luis Obispo.

I feel like this picture should be on a poster for Al Gore’s movie. :)

A beautiful sunset over a swampy inlet of Monterey Bay in Elkhorn, California. As of our stop in Salinas, we were officially listed as 2:27 behind schedule -- typical Amtrak. :) We're now due in
Sacramento, where Andrew & Bea may come say hi, at 12:04 AM.

Welcome, InstaPundit readers! I'm liveblogging my train trip from L.A. to Seattle; we're in central California, not quite to Salinas yet, as sunset nears. Tis a beautiful ride. Stay tuned for more train posts; scroll down for my Lieberman post. :)

Our train, seen from a pedestrian bridge over the tracks at the San Luis Obispo station.

We've turned away from the ocean and are heading through the Santa Maria Valley now. San Luis Obispo is about a half-hour away. Here's a photo I took earlier (when I had no cell-phone signal) along
the coastline between Santa Barbara and Vandenberg.

I guess the injured lady didn't need to go to the hospital after all, because after a longer-than-usual stop, we left with her still on board and the stretcher unused. Anyway, here's a picture I took
while outside the train at the S.B. station.

We're in Santa Barbara. Here's the stretcher that they're going to use to wheel off the injured passenger.

The train is right along the ocean. Meanwhile, an “is there a doctor on board” call just went out, and paramedics have apparently been called to our next station stop, because a blind woman fell and hurt herself. Sounds like she's going to be OK though.

We're in Oxnard, CA. In about 8 miles, we hit the Pacific coastline -- which we'll then trace for more than 100 miles.

Our train is crawling northward.