True E Online Story: Trip One
Perhaps it was the trip I took at age 13 with my father to Edmonton or maybe it was the trip to Squamish with my sister and Roger before that but whatever the genesis I’ve always enjoyed road trips. The more the better.
In fact if anyone’s looking for a navigator I come highly recommended if I do say so myself. I have a fair amount of experience, my research packages know as The Navigator’s Clipboard are immanently useful. I even have a power converter! My PDA can hold maps of any city. My 4.1 MP camera has over a gig of memory, 512 MB more and special lenses if my mommy doesn’t mind lending them.
But I digress. I meant it, I just could have expressed it at a better time.
So the original plan was to go to Edmonton in 1998 with Jon, Jeff, and Eric. It ended up being Jon and I going to Portland in 2000.
Jeff and Eric suck.
Why Portland? Well I have family there and it was near Christmas so free hotel and food. Besides it’s not the destination, it’s the journey - this is particularly true of road trips and virtually a complete lie of air travel. Also it was a reasonably tame goal for our first outing and being December we sure as hell weren’t going north.
We left as the first snow of the year began to fall. We went to the Super Mall which it turned out, was not super at all. It was barely a mall. I was able to hack into a pay Internet terminal to get free net access though so it wasn’t a total loss. We saw Dude, Where’s My Car? And the promptly lost track of the car. Hilarity ensued.
Well, maybe not for Jon, it was his car.
We stayed at a Motel 6 on Military Road, Jon thought it was kismet. What it turned out to be was a lesson that “South Seattle” does not in fact have to be IN Seattle. Or anywhere near it for that matter.
We made it to Portland without incident and discovered that was where Spring was hiding. Back home they were setting snowfall records and toying with declaring a state of emergency.
The city was very pretty but there wasn’t much to do. We met a friendly hairstylist though. I’d tell you the rest but then I’d lose my most popular family and bar stories and violate my self imposed PG rating on my blog. I’ll let your imagination fill in the blanks until you can ask me about it in person.
