MORE ADVENTURE CLIFF NOTES Two bags fell off my bike on the interstate en route to Portland. All clothes lost and tent destroyed. Killed scoot battery in Portland. Walked around town and had to special order a replacement from a cool bike shop called Cycletune. The dudes there were super friendly and even gave me a free shop shirt. Went to a massive nerd bar in downtown Portland called Ground Kontrol, which is like a Dave and Busters but done in a way that isnt shit. No food, just a single bar in a smallish footprint but two floors. The first thing you notice when you walk in is a massive screen with rock band being played on it. At first this struck me as super lame, but as i was walking around drinking and playing various games I actually ended up enjoying the sound. Its just like being in a bar with someone decent singing karaoke. It added to the overall experience instead of detracting from it. Way fun, would go again. Met up with a friend from highschool i hadnt seen in a decade Andrea Steele Strandberg. She brought her little sister who is like 11 years younger but they both look the same. Good genes! We had a few drinks and laughs and caught up on each others life happenings and talked about reasons to move to the pacific northwest. She loves Portland and after exploring it for a few days its really easy to see why. She told me about a bar with a Lovecraftian theme, which i of course visited. It was weird as hell and totally awesome. I also stayed at a weird hotel thing. McMenamins Edgefield. The McMen take old properties and modernize them a little bit, but leave as much of the old as they can. This place was a former poorfarm. Its like a massive campus with its own brewery, winery and distillery all on site and they run seemingly 24/7. There are also a bunch of small bars and restaurants all over the campus, some with a smoking rum vibe while another may feel kind of steampunk with valves and plumbing everywhere. Also a super cool lazy river style pool thing. They should really have something like that in MN....who wants to invest?! On the way to Hood River, Oregon i took the long way around Mount Hood. At about the halfway mark up Mount Hood i arrived at the Timberline Lodge. The lodge was built by the WPA (the government employed millions of jobless people to build parks, buildings, etc) during the great depression. They built it to turn the area into a vacation spot with hopes to bring in skiing dollars. It sits at about the 6000ft mark on the mountain, and honestly the peak doesnt look THAT far away when standing next to the lodge. Apparently its an 8 mile hike that rises another 5000 (11,200 total) feet or so, and after looking at it i think it would be something id like to try in the future. I snapped some pictures of the dormant volcano and hopped back on the bike. On my decent i didnt even turn the engine on, i just coasted down most of the mountain in silence with the only noise being the wind going around my helmet. It was nice. Got to Hood River and met up with yet another old highschool friend Robbie Walsh. He moved out here years ago because he has always been a huge outdoor enthusiast. If hes not snowboarding he is probably going down those same mountains on his bike with his dog Zaya running right there with him. He has been to the top of Mt Hood and probably everything else within 50 miles worth climbing. I crashed at his place for a few days and met his awesome roomies Mauricio Gonzalez Asencio and LA CY and their fleet of small medium and large dogs. The first was Prince who is a 150 lb great dane, the second was Zaya who is Robbies cool wolf mutt, and the third was Oliver the long haired chihuahua. OLIVER is especially worth noting because he at one point was lost by himself in the middle of winter in Michigan. He survived 3 weeks in the snow by himself! A CHIHUAHUA! What a badass! He lost half his body mass too, but seriously what a trooper. They also have chickens and two pygmy goats who are probably the most mischevious animals ever. They tried to sneak into the house through the dog door and stuff. Spent the first night drinking and laughing around a big firepit in the backyard, perfect. One of the days I went hiking up Dog Mountain with Mau. I should have read about that trail before i committed, as it destroyed my legs and heels. 4 miles up and pretty steep, but the view from the top was just astounding. Had a lot of good conversations with Mau too, who is in the US to learn about brewing high quality beer. He is from Chile and has traveled over essentially the entire planet already and he is younger than me. Just an awesome human being and i hope we meet again! Everyone in that house was awesome, i will definitely visit Hood River again. I am leaving a LOT of details out. But at the end of the days its hard to type stuff up when all you want to do is sleeeeeeep. After leaving Hood River i zipped a few hundred miles and stopped at some random state park whose name escapes me. I set up the tent fast and then started exploring the area before it got too dark. I went down to the riverfront where some guys were fly fishing. As soon as i walked up a guy sitting on the bed of his truck said hey! You forgot your fishing pole! This guys name was Norm, and Norm had stories. Norm is about 70 and has a tough time walking. We got to talking about living where he does, which is a few miles from the park and essentially the boonies. I say well its probably hard to get Thai food out here right? He says no! There is a place about 10 minutes away and i walk in and say (blah blah speaks thai.) Im like...what? Was that Thai? Oh, yes, i know how to speak Thai. I keep asking questions and it turns out he was deployed to Thailand with the Crypto Corps back in the day with the army. Crypto being short for cryptographic intelligence, so they intercepted and decoded any signals they came across from any country near them. He said at the time they all needed top secret clearance to be in that group, even the cooks needed it! I think he said Johnny Cash had the exact same job he had, but in a different place and during the Cold War. He was stationed in Thailand for four or five years and during that time he picked up the language. He was also stationed in Iran for a time and has an Iranian born son. I guess its a total pain for that kid to go anywhere because as soon as the customs agents anywhere see where he was born he instantly gets pulled aside. Anyway, talking to Norm was awesome and i wish he had stuck around forever honestly, but he had to leave after about 45 minutes. Cheers to you Norm! A few days later I was now in the legit Redwood forests of northern California. You will never feel like a bug as much as you will there, its like being in honey i shrunk the kids but for real. Trees go from normal size to being twenty plus feet in diameter and 300 feet tall. It looks a LOT like Endor in Return of the Jedi honestly haha. Just amazing. I camped in the middle of all of that and ended up chatting with some Germans on bicycles. Their names were Sabrina and Robert and they had flown into Anchorage, Alaska and biked to that point which was something like 2700 miles! And this isnt flat country, its mountain roads up and down! The kicker was their plan was to keep going until they hit the southern tip OF SOUTH AMERICA. WHAT! So i talked with them in the middle of the night for awhile about everything. What was weird to them about the US? (the size of cars and RVs) What were their jobs back home? (former soldier and nurse) I asked them where they had been and the answer again was, pretty much everywhere. Favorite place so far they said was Thailand. This couple was hardcore, then went months between even sleeping in a bed or buying a meal from a restaurant. Amazing. Side note, i am 99% sure that i saw these two bike right past me as i was walking across the Golden Gate bridge about 7 days after the night i met them. The universe is a funny place.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:09:41 +0000
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