Friday, January 24, 2025 Portland Costco and Apple Store

Friday, January 24, 2025 Portland Costco and Apple Store

Even though we were camped out in the southwestern corner of Washington State, we were still about 2-1/2hrs to the nearest Oregonian Apple Store.  It was a scenic drive through Ilwaco, Astoria and Seaside before we headed in towards Portland.  We made a Costco stop to top off the Bronco and pick up a Pizza for dinner and a few other items.  We had asked Siri to give us directions to the nearest Apple Store, but much to our chagrin, she lead us into downtown to a store with no parking, which was a bit of a wild goose chase.  Fortunately, there was another more suburban Mall location only about 15 minutes drive away.  We had previously bought Apple gear there, so we probably should have asked Siri for directions to that specific store.  
Ben wanted to have good backups of all of the devices on his laptop before we traded all our old gear in.  This took quite a bit longer than anticipated, so Ben sat in the passenger seat doing this while Janet drove the Bronco into Portland.  We did manage to get everything backed up just as we were arriving in the parking lot at the Washington Square shopping mall in suburban Portland, Oregon.

  
We traded in both of iPhone 13Pro models in exchange for the newer iPhone 16Pro models which now feature Apple Intelligence (whatever that is) and more importantly, a new 5x zoom lens on the camera and better batteries.  Janet’s phone was on Mint Mobile, and transferring her number from the old phone to the new was a snap. 

Ben’s phone was on Xfinity Mobile, and transferring his number proved to be a long drawn out and frustrating process that took several hours because he couldn’t activate it until the Xfinity ap was fully restored from the iCloud backup, and even then, there was a glitch on Xfinity’s end requiring a phone call to finally sort out. Janet got her old iPad upgraded to a new iPad Air which has an Apple silicon M2 processor, which is 4 times faster, and Ben got his old iPad Pro upgraded to a new M4 iPad Pro, which is about 6 times faster.  He may be able to leave the MacBook Pro at home for most trips with the new iPad Pro’s capabilities.

Washington Square Mall also has all the major department stores so we stopped in at Macy’s and Nordstroms to shop for clothes and shoes that might be suitable for Ciara’s wedding.  We’ll most likely have to order specific items online for sizing, but it was good to actually have some shoe people measure foot sizes and have some shoes to try on in person.

That made for a long day.  We drove back to Cape Disappointment in the dark, but there was very little traffic and the roads were bare and dry.  When we got back to our campsite, we were surprised to find we had a whole lot of new neighbors.  We had the entire loop to ourselves last night, but now we have someone in the Yurt and 5 other campers in the sites all on the beach side.  It’s a safe bet they will be digging for razor clams on Sunday.