Red Truck Road Trip – WEST Coast Team

Day 6 of my captivity. I suppose you might be surprised by the fact that I haven’t escaped yet, but the lack of appendages makes things like free moment a little difficult. Once again, I found myself unceremoniously stowed in Mike’s camera bag, though at least he took me around the city today. Portland is one of those cities which marches to a slightly different beat than the rest of the nation. While that makes the place sound weird, it’s a good kind of weirdness which happens to make the town of of the friendliest you’ll ever encounter. Not only that, but it’s also one of the easiest places to get around on foot; the downtown has very few hills (the ones that are there have a pretty shallow incline), and the nothing seems terribly far away from anything else.

I’m pretty certain Mike has a masochistic complex, as he started off this morning with a five mile run and then decided to walk all over the city with Lia once she arrived at our hotel room. What started out as a casual stroll around the area eventually turned into a day-long journey that covered a lot of the city’s neighborhoods. Mike finally found a Sprint Store where he managed to to pick up a wall charger for his phone, and then Lia showed us the statue of Portlandia, which sits atop the entrance of the Michael Graves’ Portland Building; the sculpture, it turns out, is the second largest copper repoussé statue in the U.S. (the largest is the Statue of Liberty). It’s an intriguing piece of art… granted, it’s not the work of art that I am, but it’s impressive to stand beneath and see the metal woman extending her hand towards you in greeting.

Once Mike was done gawking at the Statue, we continued down towards the Pioneer Courthouse Square, where there were a bunch of things which managed to enthrall my pedestrian chauffeur’s ADD-plagued attention span. First, there was the statue by Seward Johnson known as “Allow Me”, which is a disturbingly lifelike sculpture made to resemble a man with an umbrella offering his hand in friendship towards passersby (appropriate due to both Portland’s consistent downpours and overall friendliness). We also discovered a group of people handing out “Free Hugs” to passersby because today was National Hug Day (I feel obligated to point out that a holiday is not official until Hallmark recognizes it and provides us with overpriced cards to give each other in celebration of said day). Anyway, Mike and Lia were all about exchanging pleasantries with this group, and then Mike decided that I needed a hug to improve my mood. I’ll get him back later for that, but I’ll admit that it was nice to be the subject of so much blatant affection. Finally, after the Cheerful Cherubs let me go, Lia showed us the Benson Bubblers, which are public drinking fountains donated to the city by Simon Bensen sometime around 1920 (the urban legend being that he was convinced people were getting drunk in Portland simply because they were thirsty and he wanted to help curtail their drinking habits). The Bubblers are always-flowing, and are arranged with four faucets at each location. If they provided free wine, they would probably be one of the greatest feats of modern engineering, but since they only distribute water I demanded that we move on to more interesting sights.

After much more sidling along sidewalks, we found ourselves at Powell’s Books, which is apparently the largest used-and-new bookstore in the world and one of the great prides of Portland natives. I can understand why people love the place: it’s literally the size of a city block and has several smaller satellite stores located around the area (two of which are in the Portland Airport, both before and after the security checkpoints). It’s almost impossible not to find something of interest to you in that store, and we each managed find something to read amidst the hundreds of shelves; Lia found some books on sociology, Mike quickly made his way to the various collections of comic books (nerd!), and I looked at some books on local wines and wineries.

(Editor’s note: pictures of The Bottle reading will be available soon)

After Powell’s we began to walk back to the hotel when Mike found a huge camera store and, inadvertently ended up taking us on a huge detour across the city during a search for an infrared filter to use with his D80 and D100. At the aforementioned shop, we ended up striking up a conversation with an off-duty sales associate named Geoffrey, who proceeded to take my masochistic travelmates on a 28 block roundtrip to find this piece of equipment. Afterwards, Mike decided to buy his newfound buddy and Lia some pizza and then Geoffrey proceeded to ham it up for the camera whilst holding me in his arms.

Finally, Geoffrey and The Other Two parted ways, and then Lia had to catch a bus home. Mike, in turn, returned to the room and then left me here whilst he went out for dinner (bastard!). Just for that, I’m going to spill red wine all over his white shirts when he’s not looking. That’ll teach him.