Portland

We presume this is where Sleater-Kinney hails from...
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We left Seattle and faced a breezy three-hour drive south to Portland. It turned out to be four with traffic around Tacoma and Olympia, but even four hours seemed like a walk in the park. Also, it was very weird to start driving south after we'd spend all that time pointing the car west.

We rolled into Vancouver, Washington and soon sat down to dinner with our gracious hosts, Janice & Brian Harwood (whose eldest son, John, is married to my sister, Jessica). After dinner we hopped over the bridge and took a little spin around downtown Portland, which we would discover in depth the next day.

So is it enough to convince me that the commune should be there?

A very excellent bookstore
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Jon's cousin, Robin, just began her residency at Oregon Health Sciences University and moved into a lovely new apartment in NW Portland (the city is divided into quadrants). On Saturday, we headed into the city, checked out her new digs, admired her brand-new couch (which had been delivered that morning!) and after some excellent burritos, strolled around Portland in the sunny, 75 degree weather. We stopped at Powell's, which is a pretty freakin' awesome bookstore, and browsed everything from bike maps of Portland to the latest issue of The Missouri Review -- where my esteemed classmate Katie Chase has an excellent story published! Rock on, KC.

Robin's excellent new couch
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After Powell's we strolled by the waterfront. Portland is a cute little town and as Robin says, it's a very easy place to live -- everything she needs is within two blocks of her apartment (including Trader Joe's!). So easy to live that her sister and (about-to-be) brother-in-law are ditching San Francisco and moving to Portland in September (after they get married).

So is it enough to convince me that the commune should be there? Well Portland is cute and livable, but it's small and feels a lot like a college town, lacking the pulsing urbanity that made Seattle so awesome. And yet, property is very affordable there. But who needs a big house anyway when you can have a two-bedroom condo in downtown Seattle?

Robin's excellent apartment
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I don't know, the jury is out. Especially because the next day, Janice took us on a little tour of the Columbia River Gorge and there is so much beautiful hiking and outdoors stuff so close to Portland. But there's that in Seattle too. I guess having two possibilities for great places to live isn't the worst conundrum in the world, especially considering the cities are so close to one another... After the Gorge, we said our goodbyes and headed out to the coast. Which means we were driving west once again...

Pretty stretch of coastline neither of us can remember
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**

I hate to ruin the continuity of things, but two things that we forgot to mention that I'd like to put in here. The first was in Glacier -- after we set up camp, we were lingering by the car and somebody noticed our license plate and yelled, "Go Hawkeyes!" arms thrust into the air. Iowans are everywhere it seems.

The second thing...Even though we don't need to say anything else laudatory about Seattle, there was one more thing I just have to mention, which is being able to listen to the world's greatest radio station, KEXP (www.kexp.org) on the actual radio in real time instead of via the internet in a place that's two or three hours later than Seattle. Rock. Okay, hopefully from now on we won't forget anything, but we make no promises. It was 105 driving through Redding, CA today and I am pretty sure my brain started to melt...