Our last road trips were three months ago when we spent a
week in Portland over Thanksgiving followed by a weekend in SoCal to help Jana
and Andy with their holiday party. The first three months of 2017 have been
spent housebound dealing with the unceasing torrential rains. I’m not
complaining. I prefer the challenges that come with excessive rain to those of
a seven-year drought, but by early March Verne and I were both feeling the
effects of cabin fever and in much need of a road trip. The rain has been a
constant reminder that our house is aging (as are we). I would swear that we
bought the 30 or 40-year roofing 20 years ago when we built our dream home, but
our leaky roof says otherwise. And, if that’s not enough we also sprung a leak
in the basement this year. It brought back memories of building the house back
in 1996, another wet year. One morning, while the house was still under
construction, we walked downstairs to the basement to check the sheetrock that
had been delivered the previous day and stepped into two or three inches of
water covering the basement floor. Unbeknownst to us the spot we’d chosen to
build the house was on an underground spring of sorts. Seasonal, but active
during the rainy season nonetheless. That was the beginning of the end of my
relationship with our excavation contractor. After trying a couple of makeshift
solutions the contractor returned to install horizontal wells under the house
and a French drain around the back. All has been dry for two decades. Until
this past February when I discovered moisture in our basement office. Nothing
like the standing water we experienced that first year, but moisture. Scream!
That was the last straw (leak, in our case). I was more than ready for a road
trip – I was ready to move! Well, spring has officially arrived and with it
more dry days than wet and no more leaks for now.
Anxious to begin our Portland adventure, we left mid-day on
Wednesday, March 22nd, stopping in Ashland for the night and
finishing the drive the following day. This gave us the afternoon and evening
to run a few errands and meet Lauren for dinner. We often plan to arrive a
couple of days early to give Verne time to work on the to-do list Lauren’s
left. The list was short this time with the one major item (power wash, bleach
and refinish her deck) needing to wait until summer. For the most part Lauren
is self-sufficient and able to deal with the day-to-day fix-it issues that come
up with a little help from Google, YouTube, or as a last resort she goes to Lowe’s
and gets advice. Her goal is to Go Green and since our previous visit she’d
replaced her thermostat with an energy efficient Nest Thermostat (she’s now a
“Nester”) and since we were there last month she has installed a touchpad for
her garage door and made an attempt to replace her shower heads with the
water-saver kind. Unfortunately, that last DIY home improvement has gotten the
better of her and requires the kind of brute strength to remove the existing
heads that only her daddy can provide, so the project will wait until our next
trip in May.
Good to be back in Portland
Very early the following morning we picked up Jana and Andy
and drove on to Washougal, Washington, which is just across the Columbia River
from Portland. Why Washougal? The main Pendleton Woolen Mill is there. Verne,
being a big fan of Pendleton, has wanted to visit the store for some time now
and we all love factory tours. We just missed the first tour of the day but put
our time to good use and shopped their retail store. Years ago, near the time
when we moved to Amador County, the girls and I bought Verne his first “man
bag” as a Christmas gift. I’d reached my limit, rather my purses had reached
their limit, on what I could reasonably carry for him. It started out being his
pipe, tobacco, and related paraphernalia. His sun glasses and entertainment
(hard back books at that time) were added to the list. It got to be too much
stuff! Thus, the man bag. His first bag was a medium-sized Tommy Hilfiger bag
in typical Hilfiger manly colors, blue and red. He embraced the idea of
carrying a man bag and found more stuff to put in it until within the year he’d
outgrown the Hilfiger bag. The following Christmas we found a beautiful Pendleton
bag the size of a small piece of luggage. He loved it and has carried that same
Pendleton bag for nearly two decades. It’s still structurally sound, but
definitely shows its years of wear. The girls and I have searched for a
replacement to no avail. This past Christmas I found an LL Bean bag that I
thought might work. It arrived. I tried to convince myself it was almost equal
to the Pendleton bag. But no. It wasn’t even close. I returned the bag and told
Verne he would have to make do with his tattered bag and hope that it outlived
him, because it was irreplaceable.
Nothing quite so soft
Love all things Pendleton
Irreplaceable, that is, until our visit to the Washougal
factory where we found a single man bag made from distressed leather (perfect
for a man who will quickly distress it), trimmed with a bright-colored plaid
Pendleton fabric (not the typical geometric Indian designs that I love, but
very bright and happy), and a shoulder strap, which the previous bag didn’t
have. It is just what we wanted! We bought the bag along with a coordinated small
bag to hold his pipe and related stuff. It couldn’t be better! And that was
just the beginning of a perfect Pendleton day. We enjoyed an hour long factory
tour (there’s four each day) that ranks second to none. We saw the bales of
wool; carding, spinning and dyeing machines; laundering; and extensive quality
control. Pendleton is a sixth-generation, family-owned business. They are
certainly doing something right, because to this day the mill continues to
thrive with greater demand for their product than what they can supply.
Back home in Volcano with his new Pendleton man bag
We returned to Portland and had a light lunch at one of
Lauren’s favorite restaurants, Olympia Provisions, located next door to Smith
Tea. We couldn’t resist sharing our November tea-tasting experience with Jana,
so following lunch we sampled several new teas and shared a cup of Matcha,
pictured below. They were all excellent. Andy, being as British as he is
Scottish and thus knowing his tea, ordered a cup of Bergomot tea. We passed
around his Bergomot and found it to be incredibly good. And I thought I didn’t
like black tea! There is such a stark difference in taste when tea is properly
brewed at the correct temperature and for the correct amount of time. Doesn’t
everyone just hang a Lipton’s tea bag in a cup covered with boiling-hot water
and wonder why it’s so bitter? I never realized the complexities of brewing tea
until I started to read “The Story of Tea”, a 400+ page book on the subject
that Lauren gave me for Christmas. There’s a lot to learn.
Might we be overdoing the tea tasting?
The girls had made reservations for my birthday-celebration
dinner at Laurelhurst Market where we’d enjoyed our post-Thanksgiving dinner
last year. I was concerned about this particular “repeat” because our first
experience there had been absolute perfection. It’s sometimes hard to live up
to such high expectations and I didn’t want them to be disappointed if the
evening was not quite as perfect as our first experience at Laurelhurst had
been. Wasted worry. It was even better! We had the same table, the same waiter,
the same incredible food and wine. What made it better? Part way through our
evening Verne noticed that Juliette/Eve from the television Sci Fi series, Grimm,
was seated at the table next to ours. She was (intentionally) shielded by her
companion so that she could only be seen at a certain angle. We are Grimm fans,
partly because it was filmed in Portland, and while the character Juliette was
not one of our favorites, when she became Eve, the bad-ass hexenbiest, she
quickly moved to the top of our fave list. Seeing her in person was the “cherry
on top” of a perfect birthday celebration.
Saturday was another day of eating great food, tea-tasting (at
the second Smith’s location on the east side of the Willamette River), and a
little body-piercing for good measure. I’ll begin with the eating. When Lauren
moved to Portland eight years ago (Yes! It's been eight years and she's officially an Oregonian!),
Mexican food (of the high quality we expect) was non-existent. It’s still hard
to find, but she has found one excellent Mexican restaurant, so we started our
day with brunch at Autentica in northeast Portland. The food was authentic (as
suggested by the name) and it was gourmet. It’s not often that either of those
descriptions hold true for Mexican food, although even Americanized Mexican
food is better than none. The experience definitely bears repeating, so expect
to read more about Autentica in future blogs.
The Whole Fam at Autentica's
What a cute group
A highlight of the day was our next experience at a
tattoo/piercing shop near the restaurant. Lauren wanted to have a fifth ear
piercing and Jana wanted to have her ears re-pierced (she only thought they’d
regrown and closed—they had not) and after she was “on the table” she asked to
have her nose re-pierced (it too only needed a little nudging to re-open the
hole). Such fun! We laughed and cried and walked out having had another
memorable experience as well as newly bejeweled piercings. No tattoos. And not
me, just the girls.
Handling the pain like a champ
Ouch!
Portland is sometimes called Bridgetown for all its bridges. I think it should be called Brewtown or Beertown for all of its microbreweries. Our afternoon was spent at Wayfinder Beer drinking beer and playing cards. This
is a popular thing to do if you’re a millennial or even a baby boomer (me) and
a super senior (Verne – he just missed the cutoff to qualify as a baby boomer). Often these beer joints have games available
to play. If not, no worries because Jana always carries a deck of playing cards
with her. We spent several hours playing 500 Rummy before we moved on finishing
our day in downtown Portland with dinner at Thai Peacock followed by an hour at
Powell’s Bookstore browsing the stacks. It was at our Thanksgiving weekend
family dinner at Thai Peacock last November that we discovered Smith Tea and
their wonderful Jasmine tea. A few tastings, several boxes of their tea, and we’re
sold.
Jandy at Wayfinder
Jana and Andy had separate lunch plans on Sunday and left
for LA late afternoon. Before they left, however, we had a private tour of OMSI's USS Blueback and one last tea tasting
(the third of our trip!) at Stash Tea.
After they left, Verne, Lauren and I had
a big adventure planned on Sunday, which was the reason we’d scheduled our trip
for the end of March. Lauren’s Christmas gift to us was tickets to Alton
Brown’s live performance, Eat Your Science. During law school, Lauren spent a
summer working for Verne in Carson City. They would drive over Monday mornings
and return home to Volcano Friday afternoon. Five days without me. Five days
each week to break the rules and do as they wished. Whenever I “visited” them
in Gardnerville and noticed food crumbs in the living room, I’d ask (actually,
it was more of an accusation), “Have you two been eating in the living room?”
The answer was always a negative, “We would never eat our dinner in the living
room while watching Alton Brown!” I guess every family’s got to have a rule
maker (that would be me) and a rule breaker (obviously Verne) in order to have
balance. Anyway, that was the beginning of their love affair with Alton Brown.
They’ve watched every one of his Good Eats episodes (twice) and own all of his
books. When his new book Everyday Cook came out last year, Lauren was first in
line at the Powell’s book signing to get her Daddy an autographed copy. And,
she was right there when she heard that Alton Brown was coming to town in March
2017. Thank you, Lauren. It was an afternoon and evening to remember beginning
with us being locked out of the condo, Verne’s breaking and entering, a
fabulous dinner at Nicoletta’s Table and ending with Alton Brown live! Here are
a few pictures that tell it all.
Ms. Tour Guide
OMSI Tour
A little B&E after locking the key in the house
Dinner at Nicolleta's Table in Lake O
The Big Night with Alton Brown
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