on the road home

yesterday, after leaving our comfortable holiday inn, we headed for widmer brewery for lunch/breakfast. what i mean by breakfast is, we had beer (at least dan and i did) and a pretzel and some brie dip for appetizers and finished off the meal with lunch of sandwiches. everything was supertasty, especially the beer. our waiter was this pseudo hip guy, who i decided drove an acura, possibly with LED lighting on his car, and so we asked him for advice about where to go in portland to just wander around and possibly go to "some funky shops." he responded, "what, you mean like head shops?"

we didn't know we looked like that kind of person, but apparently we do.

ignoring our waiter, we headed for the hawthorne district in eastern portland where i got sucked into buying a lamp that looks like a turtle. it's kind of awesome. we checked out other stores, including a store dedicated entirely to cats, a fun vintage store, and the non-profit women's bookstore which featured (well-written and well-read i'm sure) books about how to learn to telepathically communicate with animals.

after our shopping spree, we decided we wanted diet pepsi slurpees. we went to the 7-11 on hawthorne. they didn't have the diet pepsi kind. disappointed, we moved on and ran some errands (hopefully i never have to think about judge marie rucker in texas ever again), and then went looking for mount tabor park, which is basically an extinct volcano within the portland city limits. we found the park, but then couldn't find the plaque or monument to the volcano itself, even after we wandered/half-hiked around for a while. finally we found it about 25 feet from the parking lot in the opposite direction.

this frustration made us even more determined to find diet-pepsi slurpees so we looked up in a phone book and found one on SE stark in the 16000 block. we were on stark in the 400 block.

but we were determined and we drove there. we found no diet pepsi. on the way back, we found two more 7-11s (that weren't in the phone book, i swear) which also lacked the (artificially) sweet sizzurp.

temporarily giving up, we went to this bizarre thai place for dinner. portland sure has its share of impressively weird restaurants. this one was run by a very happy thai man who asked for our names when we ordered and REMEMBERED them even at the end of the dinner. we got free, refillable thai iced tea, free appetizers and free dessert, and as the owner danced around and sang along to the music, he told us that "the entertainment is free too."

needless to say it was an awesome dining experience.

after dinner we went down to corvallis, native town of beth hoover our awesome oregonion host. on the way there we had to stop by the 7-11 in albany which beth knew had the diet pepsi. we went in there and sure enough, there it was, spinning around. but it didn't look ready - it was still dark brown and not icy. we stood there and glared at it for a while, while dan helped himself to sugary slurpees. then the 7-11 woman came over and told us all we had to do was try it a couple times. she did that, and told us to wait. then we waited. then we tried it - and nothing came out. the 7-11 woman had to force the slurpee to start slurping out - and a piece of ice came out of the thing and the slurpee exploded. it was quite an adventure i have to say, but we eventually got our diet pepsi.

after reattaching the horns and eating yummy oregon watermelon and blueberries with beth's mom (and talking to arielle on the phone), we headed for beth's favorite coffeeshop, the beanery, where beth and i got "pooh's picnic" - hot chocolate with the best whipped cream i've ever had and four teddy grahams on the top.

there was a massive dry lightning storm going on, so we drove out to a field/hill/park thing and walked out a little ways to watch it. dan said it was like fireworks, celebrating the last night of the road trip. it was really nice - peaceful.

this morning we left oregon at 9. aside from a very weird dining experience in medford, oregon for lunch (a "deli" where you had to be 21 because they have keno machines, and which reeked of cigarette smoke), and my minor freak-out when we drove through redding (which is like a boring maze of mini-malls), the drive has been uneventful - and currently it's 6:30 and we're 27 miles from san francisco.

it is good to be coming home, but it's also very strange. the life that we've been living for the month has been wholly real, sometimes routine, and very material. and as we drive back along the freeway, i realize that the life i'm about to start living is still sort of dreamlike and unrealized. but i know that in a week, it will also be a new routine (not in a bad way) and a new way of living, and this trip will seem like something that hardly happened, or like a dream i had sometime between graduation and now. that's what's weird (and what's good) about a road trip - you always come home at the end of it.