Prelude - Portland, Oregon. 27th - 31st May

OK, so better late than never, right?  I haven't been too bothered with getting this blog started, but I've found some time/desire, so here goes.

Well, I had a pretty ordinary flight from Melbourne to LA.  I actually had an aisle seat and a spare seat next to me, but I still couldn't get a wink of sleep until about 2 hours out of LA.  And that's when they turned on the lights and started to serve brekky.  I then had a 5 hour layover in LA before catching my flight to Portland.

That flight was OK, only 2 hours, but as the descent started, my left ear wouldn't 'pop'.  No matter what I did, it would stay blocked, and started to get pretty painful.  By the time we had landed, it had subsided a bit, but I still had trouble hearing out of it.  Mix that, with my accent, and being bloody tired, it's probably no surprise that the guy I was asking for directions couldn't understand a word I said :)

I arrived at my hotel by 11pm, and pretty much crashed.  It's a very simple room, bed only, with shared shower and toilets.  The rooms are right above the bar where they have live music every night which ends at midnight.  I knew all this before I booked, so it wasn't a surprise.

I pretty much crashed all the next day as well, other than a quick walk up Mississippi Avenue which is a kind of historic/trendy street.  I was back in bed by 2pm.  Great weather, was nice to be in 28 degC sunshine.

Portland has a kind of tram/light rail network which was pretty handy to get into Downtown (CBD).  I just stuffed around in the city for two days, exploring the different beers as much as anything.  I've heard Portland is called Beervana and it's easy to see why.  There's a huge micro/craft brewery scene here.  One brewery just up the road from my hotel had a fun run on Sunday.  They had t-shirt printed which advertised "Drink a beer, run a mile, drink a beer, PARTY!!!".  So, at 9am on a bright, warm, Sunday morning, the participants lined up for a beer, chugged it, ran down a, quite steep, hill, turned around and ran back up it, to get stuck into another beer.  Then they had some live music for the rest of the day.  What some people will do for a beer - and some of these people had as much experience running as what I do :)

Bike (pushy) riding is very popular.  Everywhere you go, there's bikes.  The trams have plenty of space to fit bikes as well - it's pretty cool.

Once again, the homeless situation threw me for a curve.  Just on the outskirts of Downtown, there's a stack of homeless.  I saw one park that I thought looked really nice, until I realised it's where a lot of homeless people had set up home.

On Sunday I jumped on  bus to get down to Bend to pick up the bike.  The bus driver was, erm.. different.  She announced "Hi everyone, my name is Starla if you enjoy the ride; if you don't, my name is Leroy Brown - coz he's bad".. ok...

OK, that's enough for now.. Next post will be about the start of the ride.