Prineville to Portland
Breakfast this morning was last night’s left over pizza, and some Cheetoh’s which we’d had since the East Coast but who’s bag popped when I was putting the bags in the boot today. We washed this down with drinks from a fast food place next door to the gas station where we filled up — because the gas station was in the process of refitting, and couldn’t sell us its own drinks.
The drive to Portland was dominated by views of Mt Hood and Mt. Jefferson.
We got hungry just as I realised that we were near the Timberline Lodge halfway up Mt. Hood, and that there was food to be bought there. This turned out to be a great move. The lodge was used for exterior shots of the hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s dreary and incomprehensible The Shining. The lodge was build in 1937 by New Deal labourers, and a fine job they did.
First we tried the Blue Ox bar for food, but its menu didn’t suit Debbie — basically it was choice of turkey sandwich or ham sandwich. Debbie likes neither turkey nor ham. There was a soup option, but today’s soup was "banana and cream soup, served cold"… really. Instead we had nice food on the second floor mezzanine, which to our surprise was two flights of stairs from the ground floor, like the second floor should be.
We drove on, along a route which apparently closely follows that of the original Oregon Trail, so I tried to picture myself in a covered wagon on the same route. It didn’t really work, since we were doing 55MPH, and fretted every time we got stuck behind anything going slower.
It didn’t take long until we reached Portland. We’d chosen the Day’s Inn from the options in the Pacific Northwest Rough Guide kindly lent by Paul, because it was in a reasonable price bracket and convenient for the downtown area. I navigated us right there, and was very proud of that. The book says you should always book ahead, and indeed, they only had smoking rooms left — but we had a look and the room is fine and does not stink (although the corridor isn’t too nice).
Our room has a nice collection of books, including four volumes of "Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers" — 1958 , 1960, 1961 and 1962. 1960 includes Digital Computation for Stiffness Matrix Analysis. A great read.
After some relaxation, we went for an explore and a feed.
Portland so far is just a reasonably pleasant city — one city is much like another. It has some pleasant art on the street, a chinatown, and an "old town" area with "historic" buildings and cobbles.
We stopped for a pint in the "Rock Bottom" brewpub, which was very nice and became two pints. Then we went to pursue dinner. That ended up being in a Japanese restaurant on 6th Street. Debbie had a combo meal with Miso, roll sushi, salad, steak and chicken yakitori. I had a Natto Sushi Donburi, which is… unusual. It was a bowl containing sushi rice, then a layer of seaweed, then five types of sashimi, then a pile of natto, topped of with a little raw egg with the top sliced off. The waitress warned me, but I had tasted natto before, so I knew roughly what to expect, and I enjoyed it.
We got back to the hotel and caught the end of Big Brother. Tonight’s episode was a thinly veiled excuse to promote the film Four Brothers (which sadly has nothing to do with Zimbabwean band and John Peel favourites "The Four Brothers"), by making a viewing of the film the prize for a challenge. Shameless.