Remember how I’m Alex, and my parents drive me crazy?
Yeah, well last Wednesday I find my cousin in Portland online and say him. “Dude. I need a break from my family.”
At first, good cousin Max informed me he was busy the coming (last) weekend. Then, a moment later he returns, to inform me he was gravely mistaken, and was indeed free that coming weekend, excepting helping his friend Stella move. Game on. Train tickets arranged for last friday, 8:15 in the morning.
My step-dad gave me a ride to the Tacoma Amtrak station. Train takes off, hurtling wantonly through the countryside towards P-Town. Until, well, it stops hurtling wantonly, just after Olympia.
Turns out, the host-railroad is replacing the ties, and the track is down to one line. And the northbound trains were there first, or benefitted from a northbound train being first there at some point… or promised the dispatch a nice bottle of whiskey on their return. In any case, we had to wait for the Northbound trains to use the track.
We waited an hour, without moving. The shittastic movie, ‘Surrogates,’ they were showing finished – and we hadn’t even made half of the trip. When we started again, we were under speed restrictions, so as not to run over the nice fellas working on the train.
Oh, and the train right in front of us had debris stuck underneath it, and was ESPECIALLY slow. And then it stopped, because apparently the debris wasn’t falling out on its own.
All told, a trip that was supposed to arrive in Portland at 11 am, and we arrived at 1:30 PM. Needless to say, we were all ecstatic.
Frustration be damned, however. I was on vacation! I meet my cousin, and we drop my shit off at his place, and we set out on a mythical quest to aquire that rare object – lunch.
Max takes me to this Thai place he knows, and we have the spiciest food we can find. Literally, I was sweating as I ate. We also had the first beers of the day. Then, Max went to work, and I wandered around Portland’s Pearl District, a supernice neighborhood of overly expensive stores, restaurants, and tall apartment buildings, with a few little parks scattered about to raise property values.
Cut to home-cooked steak dinner that night with Max’s friend/former roommate/neighbor Mark. Delicious. Then off to help his friend Stella move in to her new apartment. Stella isn’t unattractive, but her initial personality makes her more interesting, at least. She promises to buy us a beer to repay us for helping her. Naturally, we don’t see her again all weekend. Bitches ain’t shit…
We head over to a beerhall called the Lucky Labrador, and get to some drinking, and oggling the crazy-attractive waitress/beer wench’s phenomenal sweaterkittens and fine framing sweater which she displayed them with.
In the private party room at this particular establishment, an engagement party was roaring along. One of its participants wanders by, returning the darts he’d borrowed from the bar. As we’d selected this place particularly for the capability of playing darts, Max flags him down to ask if he is, indeed, doing what he appears to be doing. And promptly convinces me that there is no way in hell this was a stranger. Max schmoozes the hell out of this guy. Honestly, I remain unconvinced he didn’t actually know him.
Mark rejoins us, and concurs that yon fair maiden needs extensive ogling. We partake of another pitcher of fine Portland beer, and then it’s back to Mark’s for a coffee break, as we were all up early, and Max wants to hit a Tequila bar called Matador.
Coffee downed, Max and I abandon Mark (it was like an hour and a half since he showed up, we just didn’t do anything particularly interesting – other than me receiving a text from my friend Jeff stating how good I look in a bikini and further gay shit. Don’t ask don’t tell, brother!)
Matador is a testament to Portland’s apparent Happy Hour tradition. For less money than the Tequila we sampled, we got a monstrously heaped plate of black bean nachos AND some steak tacos. Fantastic. The waitresses, however, were not quite as attractive as the beer wench at the Lucky Lab, and so I was disappointed. I had an IPA of some sort there that wasn’t bad, but I can’t remember its name. And we left there after a short stay to sleep the dream of the drunkards.
The next day, we had breakfast with a few of Max’s friends – Mark (from the night before), Pete, and Otherdude, who all seemed very cool – at this dive called My Father’s Place. For 33 bucks, we all ate way too much food – as in, I didn’t need to eat again until late that night… a lot of food.
We then drive out to the Columbia River Gorge, driving along an historic US Highway that passes along the river for a long way, and passes along sites such as the Vista House and Multnomah Falls, famous stops to Oregon as well as the Columbia River. Very, very beautiful part of the country. From there we redirect up the Hood River and up to the Timberline Resort on Mt. Hood, only to be disappointed in the cloud-cover preventing us from the spectacular view one generally can achieve from 6000 miles up. We enjoyed a snack and a few beers at the resort, then retired to a cabin his boss has lower on the mountain for a night of dutch-oven baked Chicken and movies (Minority Report, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Maverick)
Sunday brought brunch at his mother’s (my aunt, Kathy) house, and a relaxing afternoon of doing… nothing. Then dinner with Mark (again) at Rogue Public House, where I had the most delicious Kobe Blue Cheese Meatballs and Spaghetti dish, and a sampling of very fine beer (one of which we snagged as a 64 oz. Growwwler and I brought back to share with my parents.) From there I got back on the train, and returned to Steilacoom.
Where my mother’s first sentence spoken to me was “Make me some Bruschetta, Fatty.” So good being home!
