Last week I went to Portland, Oregon to visit Nate and write a travel story while I was there. Here is my adventure.
I left San Francisco taking the BART train at 3:30PM, transferring quickly at the Oakland airport station to AirBART, which dropped me off at the airport. I made it through the security line quickly (unusual for Oakland) and then had an hour to spend at the gate before boarding.
A bit earlier in the day, Nate had called to say there was a sudden change in the weather and that a storm was blowing in. Checking the monitors, flights to Seattle were being cancelled left and right. I heard that the airport was shut down.
The Portland flight was delayed an hour, then they told us to hurry up and board so we could try to make it in the calm between two storms. An hour and a half later over the Portland runway, the plane began to shake. We were almost on the ground when suddenly the plane headed up into the sky again.
The pilot came on to say that we had experience "wind shear" as we approached the runway, and that's considered an emergency situation. So they were required to take off again- and head for Seattle to land there.
The half hour ride there was a bit bumpy, getting worse the closer we got. As we got somewhat near the airport the turbulence was nuts. Soon I could hear two different people start puking in the back of the plane. The guy directly behind me started huffing into the barf bag to prevent hyperventilation (or whatever that does). This made it even worse.
On this ride I discovered a new relaxation tactic I think I will use in all sorts of situations from now on. I was reading Mixology: The Journal of the American Cocktail, and found that I was calmer when I pictured a refreshing, well-made drink.
You hippies can do your yoga and meditation and breathing whatnot, but that's not working for me. My new strategy: Close your eyes and think of a rye Manhattan.
Soon the plane was safely on the ground and I was thirsty as fuck. Unfortunately, I was on the ground at 11PM in Seattle, and Alaska Airlines doesn't do jack squat for you for problems due to weather. There were no flights going out later that night to Portland, and when I went up to the counter I found I couldn't get one until 5PM the next day. I went to the rental car counter to try to bum a ride from someone but by then it was midnight and I decided that driving four hours in a windstorm at that hour was probably not a great idea.
Meanwhile, Nate had a FlexCar and had been driving back and forth to the airport twice to pick me up when the plane was delayed, then landed in Seattle without telling anyone in Portland.
I checked myself into a Quality Inn by the airport. The "quality" was not evident in the smell of trash all down the hallway to my basement level room. I got on the phone and tried to get another way out of Portland. The Greyhound busses were not answering, there were no available trains for two days, and rental cars would have been at least $80 more dollars for the three hour trip.
I returned to my room after a run to the 7-11 in a horrific windstorm to have a full half an hour of relaxation before the power in the hotel went out. Also, the heat. It remained so until I left in the morning to go back to the airport to join the 300 or so other people trying to fly stand-by. So I paid $60 for a dirty hotel room I was in for less than two hours with working lights and heat. Terrific.
Back at the airport after a whopping four hours of sleep, I found out that they were going to run a bus to Portland for people for whom that was there final destination. This was good because the storm picked up again in the morning and all the flights through Portland were beginning to be delayed or cancelled.
An uneventful three-hour bus ride through wind and rain and sleet and hail later, we arrived at the Portland airport. It was a mere 23 hours after I left my house to get there. It was Friday.
That afternoon, we drove around a bit and checked out the Kennedy School. It's owned by the McMenamin's, a company who owns more than 50 properties, most of them microbreweries, in the Pacific Northwest. The Kennedy School is a barely-converted middle school that now houses a bed & breakfast with rooms in former classrooms, a restaurant and brewpub, a movie theatre with comfy plush loveseats to sit on, a hot soaking pool outdoors, and two mini-bars in other classrooms.
The McMenamin's own a lot of properties like this. They like to convert historic older buildings into brewpubs and movie theatres. They have a new one in a former mortuary, one on a former manor house on a farm (with additional bars in sheds), and one in a supposedly haunted brothel/opium den/shanghai bar.
That night for dinner we went out with a representative from the Portland Oregon Visitor's Association and the writer Byron Beck from local alternative weekly Willamette Week. We ate at the Blue Hour restaurant, one of those trendy/fancy/good cocktails venues. Dinner stretched into four hours and then we went out for drinks afterwards.
We headed to Mint, which is also a restaurant famous for their cocktails. The bar director has a book coming out on Chronicle Books in March that is basically how to make everything on their cocktail list, at which point they'll start serving an all new one at the bar. I had a drink of vodka infused with beets with a touch of citrus juice. It was blood red and tasted like lemons and limes sitting in dirt. It was fantastic.
Then Nate and I went to a gay bar called Embers. There was a dance club in the front, which was taken over by straight college kids dancing to eighties music. In the back were some generally standard drag acts. The bartenders and crowd at the bar were nice though, and Nate knew them.
But the weather outside was bad and a cab driver told us that it was turning into "freezing fog" which I've never heard of. In any case they were considering pulling all the taxis off the street and that would have stranded up six miles from Nate's house. So we left at 1:30.
The next day we went to the Saturday Market that happens every week downtown. It's where local people sell crafts and such. It was the usual crafty businesses: soap, carved wood sculptures, sarongs, knitted hats and other things, blown glass, and jewelry.
Portland is a good town for drinking- it's a huge coffee town, which figures given the wet and often foggy weather. Then there are the microbrews- something like 23 brewpubs in the city limit (I'll look that up later), and a nearby wine country region called Washington County. Within the city, I was impressed by the number of cocktail spots and specialty drinks on the menu.
Saturday late afternoon we had brunch with Nate's roommates Tyler and Jamie. Apparently it's normal to have brunch at 3PM or later in Portland. I had a veggie burger that was coated in batter and deep fried, served on a bun. It was fat-tastic. It's hard to get food that bad for you when you're a vegetarian. I washed it down with a frosty local beer.
That night Nate and roommates threw a holiday party at their house. The crowd was about 80% lesbian, which is a-okay with me. Me and the lady-lady lovers get along just fine.
We were trying to come up with a vegetarian equivalent for Tur-Duck-in', the classy meal of a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey (or is it the other way around?), but using tofu, tempe, and seitan. If I could create such a thing I'd make millions, beating out the Tofurkey for best-selling holiday meat alternative. But what to call it? Seitopé.
The party lasted until 3:30 in the morning, which apparently is pretty late for their gatherings. I think I impressed the guests with my rousing retard and Polack jokes. I think I pleased Nate in that he wasn't the most offensive person in the room.
On Sunday we drove towards the wine country to visit the Sake One brewery. It was fun and pretty interesting, though the obviously hungover guide grew tired of my incessant questions by the end. It was a beautiful drive either way.
We stopped into a pizza joint for some slices, then headed back to Nate's house. Rather than go bar or club hopping, which neither of us wanted to do despite that I have to write an article about it later, we chose to smoke bong hits and watch action movies. It's just like home!
Monday was our last day to hang out, so we had to power tour. First we had breakfast near Nate's house. Eggs, of course. Then we headed downtown. The art museum was closed so we walked through the shopping district with all the malls.
Then we had some fine Spanish coffee at a bar. We don't have that in San Francisco, really. It's a sugar-rimmed coffee glass with rum in it, lit on fire. Then it sparks up as you sprinkle cinnamon and nutmeg into it before adding triple sec, coffee liqueur, coffee and cream. Fantastique!
We then went to the huge Powell's Books and did some book shopping. I got an old cocktail book, a new cocktail book, and a book about pirates. This should come as a surprise to no one.
We swung by the Chinese Classical Gardens, then headed up to the Nob Hill district (of Portland). Nob hill is full of small boutique shops and yuppie stuff, with the usual tavern on every block to make it feel like Portland. We stopped into a McMennamin's pub up there for some Cajun tater tots, a grilled cheese sandwich, and a six-beer sampler. Healthy!
Then it was time to head back down the hill to the Burnside Triangle district (a.k.a. Vaseline Alley) where the gay bars are. We stopped into one stripper bar, one great upscale-ish bar, one club-type space, and somewhere else that I don't remember because in the other bars I'd had a shot of vodka, three beers, and two shots of tequila.
The next day I slept until 11:30AM, then took a thankfully uneventful flight back to San Francisco. The end.