Canada Post and Other Nice Things

I've been writing to some of you telling of Mr. Duffy's and my upcoming plans to take a trip. Well, the wonderful event is now very recently in the past. If you've had a letter from me in the last few months you may know that at the end of April we celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary. To mark the happy occasion we took our first ever cruise. We took a short one to get our feet wet and figure out what we liked and didn't like about cruising or whether we liked cruises at all. Well, it turns out we liked it very much. We sailed from Los Angeles to Vancouver where we stayed for a few days in a town nearby out of the city before taking the train down to Portland where we saw old friends. 

But, while in Canada, we stayed in a resort hotel with a beautiful view and a wonderful area for walking. It was once a golf course. This is the view from the balcony of our third floor room.

What's more, I wrote letters on the ship and mailed them from an ever so conveniently located post office near the hotel. Mailing letters from Canada shouldn't have been so exciting but it was.

And then there was this darling little library on the ship which was too popular during the day but around dinner time I was able to settle into a seat and do some reading. There was a classics shelf which turned out to be all English literature and I introduced myself to Henry James by reading the introduction to The Portrait of a Lady. After reading the first paragraph I new I must read this book and resolved to by a hard cover edition. 

Prior to our trip I had been told about a no less than amazing bookstore in Portland that was said to occupy an entire city block. Powell's does indeed occupy a block and is large enough that maps are provided for visitors. Sections are color coded.

Unlike most book stores, new and used books share shelf-space at Powell's and I was able to find a hardcover, gently used edition of The Portrait of a Lady. I could now return home satisfied. The next day our friends dropped us off at the airport to fly into LAX where we had left our car and some hours later we drove home tired but happy.