Day #56 - 5/7/2011 - Portland, Oregon

A day in Portland.  What would Capt. Willard say? 

"Portland... shoot; I'm still only in Portland... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back on my bike I'd wake up and there'd be nothing.  Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker...and the walls move in a littler tighter."  (that would be Apocalypse Now, for those wondering.)

Why the heck were we in Portland, anyway?  Did it matter that this city of 583,000 is considered one of the greenest cities in the country?  Or that it has a well-established coffee culture?  Or that with so many micro-distilleriess and its 28 breweries, more than any city in the nation, CNBC had no choice but to name Portland the best city for happy hour in the U.S?  Yeah, well, it could be any of those, but it's not.  Lani has friends here...that be why.

Nick and Lani meet up for the first time in a couple of years.  Nick and his friend, Amada, worked with Lani back in Gainesville for a bit. 

 One of the bonuses of the bike trip has been the ability to see friends from around the country.

Nick and Lani worked at Tim and Terry's, a once-popular restaurant, music shop and venue for live music just off of the University of Florida campus.  Once popular, T&Ts is no longer.

Lani and I both love a good Farmers Market and we were in town for the Portland Farmers Market  at Portland State University.  The weather was gloomy, but we plugged the address into the Garmin and found a place to park.

Seeing the throngs heading towards the myriad of tents was very uplifting. 

Local locovores were already in line.  Lani and I felt like we were home (in the sense that home is where the heart is and, because of a bizarre anatomic abnormality, my heart and stomach  beam signals to my brain.)

"Locovores" endeavor to eat food produced locally.  This practice supports your local growers and reduces transportation costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

Locally produced honey is a farmers market staple.  I was accumulating an impressive stash of honey that needed to be shipped back before we resumed biking.  Honey stands give me goosebumps. 

Even though the table was enticing, it was all wildflower honey which is nice - in the sense that almost all honey is delicious - but I was seeking the varietal purity of a monofloral honey, not a polyfloral bastard honey like wildflower.  Not that I'm being judgmental.  Lani is neither judgmental, nor interested.

 A farmers market is a great place to have a meal, sampling what the local restaurants are cooking up.  A little bit of this, a little bit of that...if you have a few people, it can take quite awhile to fill up as you sample local fares.

Did you say pizza?

The food offerings were decent, but not up to the standards Sunday Santa Monica Farmers Market (captured in an earlier post.)

Freshly reheated pizza out of a brick oven...good, but not memorable.

The Portland weather in spring can be unpredictable with from warm spells to thunderstorms rolling off the Cascade Range.

It rains about 155 days a year in Portland so, in that sense, it was just an average day.  The student union building of the Portland State University campus made a safe haven.  I blended in.

The cold pizza reheated in the brick oven had no chance against a freshly made breakfast burrito.

Even if it was made by non-Mexican/non-Hispanic college-like students, the hot, freshly cooked ingredients made for a winning burrito.

Jackpot! at least in the honey-sense.  Boyco Foods, represented by, I think, the owner, had a wide array of monofloral and polyfloral honeys.  Of course, there's no rigorous truth-in-labeling in honey...you can only tell for sure if a honey is monofloral by doing a pollen analysis.  Lacking my pollenometer, I tasted.  If you have any honey at home, try it over vanilla frozen yogurt.  That's where mine will end up.

There was some good stuff here, though a few duplicated what I was already lugging.  I picked up bottles of wild blackberry, mountain flower (I know...it's polyfloral, but it had a unique taste) and meadowfoam.  The meadowfoam was really interesting with overtones of vanilla and marshmallow.  It comes from an herbal plant grown in the Willamette Valley.

Downtown Portland had a nice feel, freshly cleaned from the rain.

Taking the expression "it's just a hole in the wall" rather literally, the Waffle Window makes an array of waffles.  Next time, I'll have the peanut butter chocolate dipped waffle.

For Elvis fans there is Graceland, for roller coaster fans there is Cedar Point in Sandusky, OH and, for zine, fans, there is Microcosm Publishing.   A Zine, from fanzine or magazine, is a small circulation publication (often in the 100s and occasionally a few thousand), with a real hand-made quality, often self-published using only a copier, home printer or the local copy store.   They can be autobiographical, comical, a comic, ribald, political, etc.  Lani is a big zine-fan and has volunteered at the Gainesville Civic Media Center, helping to organize their zine library.

Beaming with excitement, Lani arrives at a Special Place, the headquarters of Microcosm Publishing, the fine people who published her zine.

Lani has printed/published/made two zines, including the humorous, poignant, semi-raw, intelligent and endlessly witty Go For Broke #2: Klimbing Kilimanjaro, capturing the essence and raw human drama (my hyperbole) of our family effort to summit Kilimanjaro, the planet's highest free-standing mountain.  We looked for it on the shelves.

Here's some of the new sh...uh...stuff that is on the shelves at Microcosm.  C'mon...let's get a closer look.

Speaking of Lani's zine, you can read it at the Gainesville Civic Media Center Zine Library, or, you can buy/order it from the Chicago store Quimby's, or order it directly from Microcosm Publishing Company for the ridiculously small price of $2.50.  Never has so little offered so much insight and entertainment...41 pages, lavishly illustrated.  Lavish.

Hey!  do you see it!...top shelf, middle, the singularly entertaining Go For Broke #2.  Buy it for all of your friends...and for yourself because you are a great person and, by golly, you deserve it.

Lani and I had a nice day together.  I dropped her off at the home of her friends, Nick and Amada and returned to my ever-so-sad EconoLodge.  Hey...I've stayed in worse.