duck-shaped pain

(Part One is here)

Oregon, Part Two

Sunday

I have two places in Portland that I like to eat breakfast at. They�re remarkably the same. Both have good coffee. Both serve more than one menu item that involves feta cheese. Neither of them serves pancakes. They�re both extremely laid back and sort of hippieish, but that�s sort of what you expect out of Portland. [1]

The one I originally planned on going to for Sunday morning breakfast was La Patisserie, which is in the Old Town section of downtown Portland. It�s where I used to spend many Sunday mornings, drinking coffee and reading the paper.

There was only one problem. We were on the east side of Portland, and the restaurant was on the west side, across the Willamette River. This particular Sunday morning was the same morning as the annual Bike Pedal (it has a real, official name which I forget right now), where they close off all the bridges in town to auto traffic. It�s a neat event in theory � people get to ride and walk all over town without being hassled by cars. But in reality, closing off all the bridges over the Willamette is an incredibly stupid idea. It�s akin to having the only boat back to the mainland shut down if you lived on an island � it means nobody�s going anywhere. No matter what time of day it is, no bridges = serious traffic problems. [2] I mean, they even close down the Fremont Bridge, which has an interstate highway going over it. I didn�t think you could just close down an interstate whenever you wanted to.

So we went to the other place, which is called, coincidentally enough, Bridges. It�s about five blocks away from where I used to live, in the northeast part of the city. I used to go there once in awhile if I woke up early enough. They have excellent coffee and good sausage � high praise coming from someone who doesn�t really like sausage.

I had the Florentine Benedict � regular eggs Benedict improved by the addition of spinach. Have I mentioned one of the glories of eating at Bridges? REAL HOLLANDAISE SAUCE. Real butter. Real egg yolks. More lemon juice than you can shake a stick at. I love it so much, and it�s so hard to find. Eating eggs Benedict without it is just painful and wrong, and the scary yellow glop most places serve instead should be banned under some sort of multinational treaty.

Read the Sunday Oregonian. Now I remember: I hate the Oregonian.

We decided that this would be the best day to go see the coast. I only went to the coast once when I lived here, and my dad hadn�t been to any sort of coast in years. We figured that this was our chance.

The big problem, again, was bridges. In order to get to US 26, the nearest road to the coast, one must cross a bridge. So we drove around for awhile, seeing if anything was open, and then they finally opened up a lane on the Broadway Bridge to traffic. We were set.

Here�s another thing I hate: The Sunset Highway (local name for US 26). I used to have to drive it to work everyday when I worked out in Beaverton. It wasn�t really designed to handle the amount of traffic it now carries, and as a result, delays and traffic jams every few minutes are the rule when you depend on the Sunset. Even early on Sunday morning, it was jammed. Some big truck got pulled over and, as a result, traffic on both sides of the Sunset had crawled to a near-stop, just to see what was going on. My dad, who lived in southern California for 12 years, was aghast. �You know, there would have to be bodies laying in the middle of the highway for anyone to stop in California,� he said, �and maybe, even then, people wouldn�t stop.�

The road to the coast goes through farms and trees. The trees get bigger and the forest gets thicker as you go west, until, boom, all of a sudden, there�s the ocean. It�s a neat effect. We originally planned on going through the towns of Seaside and Astoria, then crossing the Columbia somewhere and going over into Washington a bit. But then, we got to Seaside, and our arrival happed to coincide with the national beach volleyball championships, so the town was packed. It�s sort of touristy town anyway, full of arcades and T-shirt shops and other places to take your eight-year-old when he/she gets tired of the beach. Since we neither played volleyball or were accompanied by children, we decided to head south instead.

We drove down Highway 101, the Pacific Coast Highway. Everyone must have gone somewhere else � this stretch of 101 was very uncrowded and peaceful. We pulled over quite a few times to look at the ocean. The beach in this part is much more like you imagine Oregon beaches to be like � very rocky and rugged, whereas the beach up near Seaside is more flat and sandy. We couldn�t get near the beach at this stretch of the road, but the view from the road was satisfying enough.

Further down, we got to a place called Manhattan Beach. We pulled off, hoping that this would be somewhere we could actually get onto the beach, and we were right. It was a wonderful beach � very clean, not too rocky, and the only other person there was a man with about twenty dogs, all of whom were elated to be at the beach. It made me wish we had brought Hoover along. We walked up and down the beach, collecting rocks and shell fragments. I found something interesting: a shell which was completely wrapped around a long, flat rock.

We left and headed further south. We stopped for gas in the next town, which was my dad�s first enounter with Oregon�s insane gas laws. You can�t pump your own gas in Oregon. I have no idea why. I don�t know if they think you�re too dumb to, or they think you�re going to light yourself on fire, or what, but it�s a really aggravating law. But every time someone tries to change the law, there�s a big outcry and people respond like this.

Finally, we got to Tillamook, where we did the one thing there is to do in Tillamook � the cheese tour. People were there � lots of people, all standing in line for cheese samples and in a longer line for ice cream. I was more fascinated by watching the folorn cheese employees package and weigh enormous bricks of cheese. I knew, faintly, somewhere in the back of my head, that there were also Tillamook meat products, like jerky and such, but until I visited the factory, I hadn�t made the mental connection between cheese and jerky. Apparently, most of the people there were gladly ignorant and were carrying around big armloads of long jerky sticks. I overheard one guy saying, �I wonder what these meat sticks are made of?� Cows, dummy. I limited my purchases to a half-pound of some special edition white Cheddar, which will become macaroni and cheese sometime soon.

I was in a daze after the cheese frenzy, and needed more scenery to get the cheese out of my head. We took the Three Capes Scenic Drive, which heads west from Tillamook and follows the coast for about forty miles. The first stop was Cape Meares State Park, which overlooks the ocean and is home to one tiny lighthouse (the location of the "interpretive gift shop" mentioned in the last entry).

I didn�t bring my cane with me on the trip, but not by some conscious decision. True, I don�t use it much these days, but I actually just forgot to bring it with me to Oregon. Most of the time, I didn�t notice. But after about a day and a half of continuous activity, I was missing it.

We drove on further, through many deep thickets of trees, punctuated by the occasional glimpse of water. After awhile, we got to the second cape, Cape Lookout. It was interesting: none of the other places we had been to that day had charged admission, and they were completely devoid of people, except for us. But there was an admission fee for Cape Lookout, and it was full of people. I wasn�t sure why. It was scenic, but no nicer than any other place we had been. We stopped and ate lunch � cheese and salmon jerky we bought at the cheese factory, and some Luna bars I had brought from home.

We didn�t make it all the way through the scenic drive, to Cape Kiwanda. By this time, it was fairly late in the afternoon. We headed back towards Portland, through more forest.

My dad is a big sucker for any restaurant that brews its own beer. He brews beer, too, and he likes to sample many other brews. Oregon, of course, is a big Beer Fantasia, and there�s plenty to choose from. I decided to take him to one of the many McMenamins restaurants, since I was craving one of their excellent Gardenburgers. I can never make mine taste like theirs, so my big theory is that they have special GBs made for them. We had beer (dad � pale ale, me � Ruby, a sort of light, fruity beer), an enormous amount of excellent fries [3], and burgers, both Garden and regular. My dad was amused at all the people walking down the street (we went to the Broadway location), and opined that there were many more freaks in Portland than back home. Not true � we�re just too used to our freaks to really notice them.

He was tired after that, so I dropped him off at the hotel and went out for a awhile. I hit the used CD stores that were still open, and bought many things (listed here). After I was done, I drove around, enjoying the use of the car CD player while I could.

Part Three � later, possibly sooner than you think.

[1] When my friends back in Colorado asked me to describe Portland for them, the best description I could come up with was that it was an awful lot like Boulder would be if Boulder was a large city of 500,000. There�s both good and bad things implicated in that statement. Good things include great public transportation, ethnic restaurants, and decent bookstores. Bad things include, among other things, the overwhelming, repellent sense of earnestness both places share.

[2] You should see what happens when the bridges close at rush hour (usually when a boat tries to go up or down the river). It�s an impressive display of angry people and honking everywhere.