We woke up from our last night in a hotel.  We had been arranging to stay with Jason and his wife Angela for a few weeks prior, and today would be the first day of doing so.  Jason could be described as my cousin-in-law (the brother of a husband of a first cousin of mine).  Though we may have met at the wedding ceremony where he became my cousin-in-law, neither of us remembered each other.  What I did know is that he had a young son, lived in Portland, was an easy going guy, and had great taste in blogs; he had been following ours for some time.
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We arrived, and any awkwardness having to do with asking for a place to stay was immediately alleviated.  Angela and Jason had Grateful Dead playing.  Tom correctly guessed the year of the live show from their 30-year career, and the ice was immediately broken.  I soon got around to asking if they had gathered our preferences from our blog and put on our favorite music.  Jason replied in the negative, this is just what he listened to.  Awesome.

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One of our first items of business was to go on a walk around the Southeast neighborhood where Jason resides.  Let me back up.  Portland is divided into four quadrants.  They are: Northeast, Northwest, Southwest, and, you guessed it, Southeast.  Numbered streets start low in the center of the city and increase outwards.  The Southeast is a really great area– here you can find people living together in a constant celebration of individuality and community.  Of all the places where we had seen “Keep <insert city name> Weird” bumper stickers (Austin, Texas; Ashville, N.C.; Boulder, Colo.; Louisville, Ky, and the whole state of Vermont), Portland was, in my opinion, the weirdest.

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Our short walk with Jason, Angie and their young son Niko confirmed this.  We strolled past several boxes of free stuff left on the curb for neighbors to pick through and find something useful.  There was a giant, permanent sunflower pained by the community on a local intersection.  Rose bushes were in many front yards and planted in the grassy areas between the sidewalks and curbs.  VW busses and campers, some presumably with permanent residents, were parked along curbs everywhere.  Houses were purple, with yellow accent or some other amazingly interesting combination of colors.  Previously, we had seen constantly running, beautifully designed drinking fountains downtown.  There are perhaps more bikes than cars.  The downtown free trams in “Fareless Square” are immaculately maintained and widely used.  Busses are fast and reliable.  In some streets, two lanes are devoted to these modes of public transportation leaving only one for cars, but even so, traffic is not overwhelming when compared to the east coast. 

Jason relayed the story of the McMenamins, two brothers who had helped to start the Microbrew revolution in Portland.  Part of their portfolio includes properties of historical significance, including a church, a Masonic retirement home, an elementary school, and more.  These and other old, weathered buildings have been converted into a small empire of local brewpubs and microbreweries, hotels, theatre pubs and music venues. More than one of their locations is “themed” around the Grateful Dead or other similar music.
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Our heads whirling with all this cool stuff, we sat down for a beer at the outdoor restaurant section of the Bagdad Theatre (that is the correct spelling).  The inside is a theatre that serves microbrew pitchers of beer with glass pint glasses that you can take to your seat with you.  We got a round of IPA’s and some pigs in a blanket and tots, which were all tasty. 

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We sat and told stories, first at the Bagdad and later back at Jason’s house.  Angela and Jason asked us to be careful not to tell any stories that would “ruin” surprises that hadn’t been posted in the blog yet, a request that I took as a compliment.  That evening, they cooked excellent vegetarian spaghetti with tomato sauce.  From what I have seen, tomato plants in the backyard are as common as rose bushes in the front (we however, have seen only one house that had a chicken coop in the back yard, which produced fresh eggs daily) and several people had told us what a great year it had been for tomatoes.  It came through in the sauce.  We enjoyed dinner and got some sleep, readying ourselves for the next day’s search for living quarters.  This had been the first day after the temporary suspension of our road trip, a transition marked by the re-entry to the real world, where we would no longer be living off our savings and waking up in a new city or national park almost every day.

If we had to stop somewhere, however, I am glad that it was in Portland. 

-Joey