Driver2165

Had another collision today. I guess I'm getting pretty good at handling them (Supervisor on scene: "Sounds like you handled it real well."). This is the third time I've nailed a car who turned in front of me, however the other two I was just starting to move the bus when it happened. This time, though, the other driver made a right turn in front of me when I was rolling down the road at 20 mph and all I could do was slam the hell out of the brakes and nail her. Everybody was A-OK though so we're all right. Plus I got my last trip filled and got to pull in early. So that was sweet.

Tomorrow the family (the wife and I, and my special little lady) board a non-NWA plane and high-tail it to Seattle. We'll spend three days there, Amtrak it to Portland for 5 days, back up to Seattle for 3 days, including one daytrip to Vancouver to visit Gandhi.

After spending the morning cleaning the house and fixing it up nice and pretty (no RR's on the Truth in Housing! Score!) we hopped a plane to Seattle. We were super tired and went to bed early, early enough to sleep in and still wake up at 6:45, but we had a little time to walk around and get a feel for the downtown area and Belltown. We ate at Metro is by far the most confusing transit service I've ever used. The downtown routings are one thing, (it's like they're all on detour all the time) but the fare structure is wierd. Good parts: paper transfers, no blue footballs, downtown zone is usually free. Confusing parts: the usually part of the fare free and all the times and boarding policies. Seriously here's the scoop. It's $1.25 during non rush hours. During rush hours it's $1.50 unless you go too far, then it's $2. You need a transfer to get off if you go past downtown. You board the front door going into town and the back door going away unless it's after 7pm then apparently they don't open the back door at all and it's not free downtown anymore. Oh and the rush hour doesn't change at 3pm, it changes when the schedule says 3pm (and the pocket schedule says it might not even be at that time). Anyway, it's wierd. It works.

Yesterday we had another blast. We need to buy a cable so we can plug our camera in to the computer before we put any pictures up. We hung out a bit in Ballard and Fremont, both of which are super cool neighborhoods, and a little bit in Queen Anne, which is all right. Basically just walked around and took it easy. Got our pictures taken with a giant Lenin statue and a VW-eating troll. We stopped by a pretty sweet record store (Sonic Boom in Fremont) and their used selection was incredible. I had another brilliant beer at McMenamins. We woke up at 6:45 so we decided to stay up late so we could sleep in longer today. I mean, it really sucks to have to wait around for 3 hours before anything even opens. So we went and saw Everything is Illuminated, the movie based on Jonathan Safran Foer's first book. It was quite good. We made it to 7:45 today.

Another note about King County Metro: partly because of paper transfers and free ride zone, and partly because they only stop every three or four blocks (compared to one or two in Minneapolis) the service is very quick. It's not extremely frequent (I haven't seen anything more frequent than 15 minute service, I think Minneapolis has five or six 5-10 minute routes) but they have trolley buses. We need trolley buses.

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.

Today we had breakfast downstairs at the Doug Fir. It's super cool in there. It's set up like a mid-century roadside diner, except Pacific Northwest. We went over to the Chinese gardens, which were beautiful. We took the MAX and bus to southeast Portland and ate at a yummy little vegetarian place called the Cup & Saucer. After than we went back up to the MAX and went out to Washington Park hoping to check out the Zoo and the Rose Garden. The zoo had an hour left before they closed so we skipped that and took a bus to the Rose Garden. That's one incredible garden. So we went back to the hotel, did some laundry, went out for dinner, ate incredibly large northwest organic apples. Not much of a day, but it's sunday. We thought about going to see the Hold Steady but we decided against it. The wife is tired and I'm not sure the little lady is up for some Craig Finn cock rock yet.

I almost forgot about Powell's. It is as big as they say it is. We didn't even come close to browsing around. We did get 4 children's books and only spent about 25 bucks. Not bad, I say.

This morning we ate at Milo's City Cafe, which was pretty much lame. We went over to Alberta St. and went to a cool baby boutique called Grasshopper and picked up some modern blocks I've had my eye on. We took a bus that went the slow way to the MAX so we could go to the southeast part of the city again. Portland pretty much turns into Richfield past 50th Ave. That explains why it feels much smaller than Minneapolis even though it actually has about 150,000 more residents. Plus Minneapolis has St. Paul right next to it. It seems like Minneapolis is one of the few cities in the US that didn't annex half of it's suburbs in the 1960s.

Anyway we walked down Hawthorne, which was a very cool street. It was more gentrified than Hennepin, but more "street" than Grand in St. Paul. We ate at the Barley Mill Pub, another McMenamin's enterprise. The first one, I believe. I had a yummy salad. And beer. Portland is great for beer. Not for coffee though. We stopped at Stumptown for coffee a bit later. My coffee was super watery, Bethany's chai was too spicy. Stumptown is apparantly the gold standard here. We walked down Belmont, stopped to browse at Polliwog, another baby boutique we liked. Looked in the window at Paradox. We might stop there for vegetarian/vegan breakfast.

Later that evening we ate yuppie thai food at Typhoon, it was fine, but not spectacular. From there it was Ground Kontrol, my new favorite thing about life. I taught Bethany how to play Frogger and Donkey Kong. We've got to make up for lost time with her.

Today we woke up and went over to the Pearl District and had lunch at the Byways Cafe, a nice little diner type place with cheap breakfast. It kinda remined me of my grandmother's house. We spent the next five or six hours just basically meandering around the neighborhood. They've done a great job building it up. There are a lot of old buildings, but there are also a lot of new condos, most of which appeared to be less than 7 or 8 years old. Seriously, Minneapolis gets four new condo projects and all the sudden everybody starts complaining about "too many condos" and "the city is too vertical". To those people I say grow up. There was a real cool little home store called Relish that drove me crazy. It had all the things I've been drooling about online actually in the store! I saw Amenity sheets and Lotta Jansdotter designs in the flesh! We got sandwiches from the Whole Foods and ate them in a little park nearby. The streetcar was kinda cool. It's a Czech tram, I forgot who built it.

We went back to the hotel for a little for our little midday "pregnant lady needs to lie down for a bit while her husband frantically makes notes of addresses of stores and restaurants and bus lines" rest. We decided on more downtown stuff. We still haven't really gotten out into the neighborhoods yet but there's still time. There's more to do near downtown Portland than Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco combined. We made a quick detour by the world's smallest park, which was a severe dissappointment. The bush and the sign was gone and it was just a pile of dirt with half a dead cactus sitting in it. Imagine a sad face on Ryan. We weren't quite hungry yet so we went over to this place called Ground Kontrol. It's a 25¢ video arcade almost completely filled with pre-1988 video consoles. And they have a bar. And it's 21+. We really suck at video games so we went though four bucks pretty quickly, but still. We'll probably go back and waste more money there. Basically every single person I can think of would go apeshit in there. And it wasn't all lonely wierd dudes, there were lonely wierd ladies there too. After that we walked a few blocks down to Old Town Pizza. We sat in a little sofa in a little nook and had what is billed as Portland's best pizza. It was super cool looking in there, with couches, tables, little nooks all over the place, brick walls. After scoffing at "only 30 toppings" we got a pretty damn good Artichoke and Olive (big surprise there) pizza. We were walking down Burnside to the Bus Mall to try to find a late night coffeeshop to kill time in when somebody pointed at us and yelled "Hey I know you" which scared the shit out of me because I don't know anybody from anywhere near Portland. It was the front desk lady from the hotel. We talked for a little and told her we were looking for a late night cafe and she said her and her friend were going to a bar right next to one. We followed her down there and it was open, but it was small and had some synth emo band with indie girls bouncing all over the place. We decided to skip it and go down to this place called Tiny's on Hawthorne. The hotel lady told us there's a newer Tiny's on MLK Blvd. (which would make it much easier to get back to the hotel on the bus) so we went up to that one even though I didn't know the cross street. We finally found it, and it closed at 9. I asked some people in Seattle and Portland if there are any late night coffeshops. 10pm is the latest we've seen. In Minneapolis 10pm is the time the old lady coffeeshops like Anodyne close. I thought the pacific northwest was all up in that coffee shit, but I guess it's nothing like Minneapolis. We named 10 places in Mpls that are open past midnight. We really take that for granted. Add that to the list of reasons Mpls is actually pretty cool (next to the smallest city with 5 minute bus service, better artichoke dip, more tall bikes, and more pizza toppings than countries in Europe.

I almost forgot to point out some of the highlights.

When we bumped into hotel lady and followed her to the coffeeshop, she made us jaywalk, looked at us and told us "Jaywalking is how we do it in Portland."

At Ground Kontrol, I went up to get a beer, because I've never had a beer while playing in a pre-1988 arcade before. They had PBR, High Life, and a bunch of local microbrews. I told the bartender guy that I'm not from here, maybe he can recommend something. Quote of the day: "Well we have PBR... Pabst is pretty 'Portland'".

Not a single place we've eaten at has had regular Tabasco sauce. Mild Green, yes. Some godawful creation called "Smokey Tabasco," yes. Everything is smokey by the way. Both salsas and chili's have been smokey. It's wierd. Just give me regular, man.

The lady at the store across the street asked us if we brought any "bars or hot dishes" when we told her we're from Minneapolis. What the hell did she mean by 'bars'?

Tonight on the bus a guy got up from his seat and his pants were halfway down his butt, giving all of us a great view. Seeing smelly old guys' butts on the bus is nothing new to me, but this had the whole bus in stitches. Three stops later, the guy who was laughing the hardest at it stood up. Guess who's pants were halfway down his butt. The next bus we took a dude and a girl were chatting. I overheard this sentence from the guy: "I was thinking about taking this history course next term. It's about women… and globalization… and all that."

We ate at the Jansdotter's calendar has been around and I think is even more awesome.

We took the train up to Mississippi and had to walk a lot further than we thought we did to get to the interesting part. It's a neighborhood that's just starting to get nicer with some art galleries, boutiques, restaurants and coffeeshops. The lady who works at Grasshopper on Alberta recommended Mississippi to us. She told us it's similar to Alberta. We hopped the bus over to Alberta, about a five minute ride, and had vegan lunch at Vita Cafe. Tempeh yum yum. We went down to 23rd Ave which was out of our league economically and stylistically, and just kind of lame. We ate dinner at Pizzicato, which was some above average pizza. Then we dropped a couple more dollars on Frogger at the arcade. Can't get enough of that place. If you happen to stop by in the next few days, look at the 3 and 4 scores on the Frogger high scores and think of me. That's right. We decided against going to see the Headphones at the Hawthorne Theatre because we're squares and it was too late. So we went on a little walk thought a cute little neighborhood and stopped at a wierd coffeeshop on Belmont. The Pied Cow, I think. They rent water bongs there with fancy fruity tobacco. It was in this creepy looking haunted mansion style house that was super remodeled inside to look like Pandora's Cup as an opium den. We're taking the Amtrak back to Seattle tomorrow.

Nine:

I have posted pictures of our trip. Be patient when loading them.

I'm pretty sure the Cool Hunting.]