Driver2165

Yesterday, we finally slept in after waking up way too early the first couple days. We hit up the Seattle Aquarium for fish and little kid watching. Went over to Capitol Hill (not the capitol of anything) and walked around. Cool neighborhood. We ate at the Globe where we had an hour wait after we ordered our food. It wasn't so bad, it was incredible. It was all vegan food, cooked on a wood stove. We walked around the corner and found a kids consignment/vintage store. Found some sweet vintage threads for the little lady there.

We went to an enormous REI, the flagship store, and didn't buy anything. It's cool though -- there's a hiking path and a mountain biking trail on the property. Went up to the University District to get a cord for the camera and found nothing we wanted to do out there. Less cool than Dinkytown even. We got hungry so we went over to Wallingford to get some food, found a place that was recommended but apparently you need reservations. We went over to Ballard and ate at this expensive italian place, but it was good.

Today we ate at the Cyclops, which was an awesome joint in Belltown. Sort of a Chatterbox meets Spyhouse sort of thingWe were going to take the train just after lunch, so we went downtown and looked at Flora + Henri for kids clothes, which was outrageously cute and ridiculously expensive (hint to Seattle, NYC, and LA residents that want to send us outrageously cute and ridiculously expensive kids clothes).

The scenery on the Amtrak was beautiful, and it was pretty fun to take the train instead of driving. When we arrived in Portland, we took the bus to the hotel and started to notice that people here are extraordinarily friendly. It's almost insane. In the first few hours we were here, at least 3 different people on the bus, the checkout at Whole Foods, two employees at American Apparel, and the hotel front-desk lady all struck up long conversations with us. I guess when the weather is the same every day people learn to find new subjects. We just saw the weatherman on TV take 5 minutes to say it's going to be between 54 and 64 and cloudy for the next 7 days. At the hotel our reservation was missing when we arrived, so they gave us a sort of spare room they have. It's really a 60's motel with a lounge/club/venue in the part where the parking lot used to be called the Doug Fir. They're open until 4 am. The room they gave us is right above the club, so it was amazingly loud. At first it wasn't so bad; there was Spoon, old Death Cab, the Walkmen, but then the house DJ's went on. We called for a cab around midnight and went to the Walgreen's to buy some earplugs. Our cabbie was a young lady who recognized my work stocking cap I was wearing and told us she was from Minneapolis. Anyway, the cab fare plus the plugs were the best 30 bucks we ever spent. We slept like babies. I did wake up about 3:30 and the party was still happening, but went right back to sleep. Amazing. We got a new room.

Public Transit here kicks the Saddam Hussein's ass to Russia with a belt. Portland is amazing actually.