Although every picture I took from our last day in Portland, and all the pictures from Seattle, have all vanished from my camera, the trip was still wonderful. Here are some highlights, top-ten style.

• Best drip coffee and cinnamon-sugar pastry: Cole (formerly Royal) Coffee, Oakland CA
• Best cold, gray, icy beach: Ocean Beach, San Francisco CA
• Hands-down best coffee ever, where I purchased so many pounds of beans, my bag was inordinately heavy on the way home: Stumptown Roasters, Portland OR
• Best breakfast: spinach and tofu scramble, Rockridge Diner, Oakland CA
• Best lunch: Crave, Seattle WA
• Best dinner: take-out Chinese, Santa Ynez Valley viognier, and homemade cookies with Dan’s cousins and their kids, San Francisco CA
• Second-best dinner: tomato soup, herb and lemon risotto, and Oregon pinot noir at Farm, Portland OR
• Best stunningly efficient public transportation: MAX from the airport, Portland OR
• Concurrently, best place for riding bikes again for the first time since mine was stolen in college: Southeast, Portland OR
• Best record store: Aquarius, San Francisco CA
• Best bookstore (where I scored two fantastic first editions, one of The Transitive Vampire: a Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed by Karen Elizabeth Gordon, and a book of short stories by Muriel Spark): Black Swan Books, Oakland CA
• Best part of Powell’s bookstore in Portland: the dazzling array of self-published zines and chapbooks
• Best pizza: Hot Lips (Ecotrust), Portland OR
• Best incredible dress that I could not afford to buy: Lipstick Traces boutique, Seattle WA
• Where I spent a lot of money on adorable handmade skirts: Resident’s Apparel Gallery, San Francisco CA
• Most delicious-looking ice cream sundaes that we did not partake of, stupidly: Fenton’s Creamery, Oakland CA
• Best free donut: Half & Half café, Portland OR
• Way too many panhandlers: W Burnside St., Portland OR
• Dustiest hill: Bernal Park, San Francisco CA
• Best driving tour: Julie & Josh, Seattle WA
• Best drunken romp through a visitor’s center: Space Needle gift shop, Seattle WA
• Best beer: McMenamin’s Ruby ale, Portland OR
• Scariest earthquake: 3.2, Oakland CA
• Best airline experience with free microbrew: Horizon between San Francisco and Portland
• Best store name where I purchased earrings: Fancy, Seattle WA

I’m home from work today with some kind of disgusting sickness. It kept me up all night—little, itchy coughs, headache, searing pain in my calves. I seem to have picked something up on one of the planes or trains I’ve ridden on in the past two weeks, or maybe it was simply returning to New York that did me in. Have you ever wanted very badly to leave a place you love? Have you suspected that your wanting to leave had less to do with the place than it did with you, with your dirty little slot in the place you love?