Birthday Weekend...

Birthday in Jersey..

Me and Jessie decided to head to Portland Oregon for my birthday this year, why Portland?  Storm Large wrote a one woman musical about her life that she is performing at the Portland Center Stage, the show is running from March till the end of May and I hate missing once in a lifetime shows.  If you don’t know who Storm Large is she is a singer/song writer who is from MA, she moved out west and started a band.  That band had released a few CDs and then she went on Rockstar Supernova which is where we found her and fell in love.  She is a tough, kick ass girl who makes no excuses for her attitude, language and appearance.  Since Rockstar Supernova she has released another CD which not surprisingly was her best selling one to date.  Check out her song Ladylike which she sung on Rockstar Supernova and later recorded for the CD of the same name.

So, using Marriott Rewards points, Continental miles and a travel voucher we got our trip all set for a grand total of $80 + rental car and food.  I may bitch about my job but the travel thing is one part of it I really do love.

Enough background, let’s get to the fun that was this trip…  I mean that in a mostly serious way..  Thursday’s plans: Fly from Hartford to Newark, check.  Fly from Newark to Portland, how ‘bout Friday?  It turns out that Newark was having bad weather so our flight from Hartford was delayed, ironically (or rather unfortunately) the flight to Portland was not delayed by the weather..  Our flight to Portland was supposed to leave at 6:05 (and did) and our flight from Hartford got in around 7:00… No big deal, the hotel will be on the airline right?  Nope…  Because it was the weather that caused us to miss our flight they would not put us up in a hotel for the night.  We were made aware of this while still in Hartford so I started calling/texting a bunch of people from Laire to see who lived near the airport.  Our new flight was at 7am so we decided it would be silly to get picked up by someone local just to have to be back at the airport for 5am.  A few calls later and I cancelled one night in Portland and used the points to get a room in Newark..

After texting, chatting with a bunch of people in the area we decided to have Grifo meet us at the airport and go out with him for dinner/drinks.  He got on a few wrong trains and in the end never made it over (gave up around 9:30).  While waiting for Grifo to show up we met some really cool guys, one of them was from Chicago and visiting his friend in NYC.  His friend apparently hooked him up with a crazy girl, depending on who’s version of the story you believe he was told that the girl was crazy before he went off with her.  Regardless, she was crazy and not the good kind.  She is on medication and once it wore off she got real crazy and the whole experience ended with her hitting him while sitting in the airport waiting for his flight.  I have to give him credit for doing the right thing, he grabbed her hands and restrained her knowing that the cops (or goons as he called them) would show up and break it up.  As it turns out nobody reacted at all and he had to just sit there and take the beating, makes me sick that we pay a so called security force to let that happen.

We finally made it to the hotel and now it was getting late so our food options were very limited, we ended up eating in the hotel restaurant which ended up not being that bad.  I had a steak which was very well prepared, the spices were done very nicely and it was cooked almost perfectly (crispy on outside but still pink in the middle).  The hotel had Yuengling as well which is always a win.  Not the birthday dinner I imagined (eating at a nice restaurant in Portland) but it ended up being really good.

----
Crazy Enough

When we got to the airport on Friday we couldn’t use the self check-in because our flight had been changed from the original plan, we went to the elite check in area and the elite security clearance area and were on her flight with plenty of time to spare.  Again, I love this part of my job..  The non elite lanes were out of control and we probably would have missed our flight.

Arrived in Portland, got a car and went to the hotel to shower and change before heading out for the day.  We were going to do a walking tour of Portland so we parked between the tour starting point and the theater but due to my foot we decided not to do the tour.  Instead we did the beer tour, we had lunch at a brewery called Deschutes Brewery, it was very good.  I had a burger with garlic, goats cheese and some mustard.  Jessie had a lamb burger which had tzatziki sauce on it, her burger was ok but mine was better.  We each got a flight of beers which includes six four ounce glasses, my favorites were the Mirror Pond Ale, the Amber Dawn, the Bachelor Bitter and the Gluten Free ESB.

After lunch we went to a book store called Powell’s.  This place is out of control big, they are at least an entire city block and three stories tall, they have different color rooms for what genre you’re looking for (the blue room was Sci-Fi, the red room was games, etc.).  They had some really old out of print books just sitting on the shelves used and some even new, they had autographed copies of some books for sale as well and they had a RPG section that was bigger than most stores entire sci-fi and fantasy section.  They had RPG books from the old West End Star Wars and one book from the Decipher Star Trek as well as almost any Wizards of the Coast book you could ever want.  We wandered around for a while to walk off the buzz we had from lunch.  They had an Ancient Greek section that was an entire isle, some of the books were in Ancient Greek and some were the translated versions we are all used to seeing.

After lunch we went to one of McMenamin’s pubs (the Ringler’s Annex) and I had a their raspberry beer (Ruby) which was very good, Jessie got a coffee with rum and it was super strong.  After our mid day drinks we went for a walk around the city, we didn’t see too much other than pubs and after a while ended up back at Powell’s so Jessie could get a real coffee before the show which we split.

The Portland Center Stage is a nice theater, they are actually two theaters, there is a big one upstairs which has two levels of seating and then there is the small one down stairs.  Crazy Enough was downstairs in the smaller of the two stages.  Before the show I saw Storm come in and walk up to the third floor to get ready, Jessie was standing on the stairs taking a picture of the poster when Storm walked past her.  While we were waiting for the show we saw the announcement that they extended the run to the end of June! 

I don’t know what to say about the show, it was the most personal thing I think I’ve ever seen done on stage.  She talked in depth about everything in her past, her mom had made a lot of attempts to take her own life and when Storm was a little kid she was told by her mom’s psychiatrist that it was hereditary and that she was be crazy like her mom.  She was told it would probably kick in when she was in her 20s or at the latest when she had kids of her own!  What a thing to tell a little girl!  She talked about a few of her mom’s attempts including one in which she put dishwasher detergent in dinner.  She talked about going to see her mom in the hospital and how it was when her mom would come home from these trips.  She talked about her sexuality at school and her bout with heroine when she moved to CA.  There was one really funny point when she was talking about her early sexuality when she had gotten an older lawyer in bed while she was still very young and after hours of sex after all of her makeup had worn off the guy looked down at her and asked “how old are you, really?” and she said 13.  I don’t know if she was 13 at the time or if she just said that to fuck with the guy but his reaction was hysterical.  She went on to talk about how her band and her attempt to get onto the Lilith Fair.  She also was a model for a dildo company and she relayed a really funny story about her time posing with the “product”, the camera man told her that she made their penises look small.  She finally made peace with her mom right before she finally died a few years ago, and she admits that she is indeed crazy, but unlike her mom her crazy works for her.  She’s not too crazy, she’s just crazy enough..  If you have the means I would recommend the trip out to Portland if only to see her show.  Hopefully she will release a live copy when the run is over, it would be awesome if it became a touring show.  We got the soundtrack and it has some truly amazing tracks.

----
Speaking of crazy enough…  Did you know that Seattle is only a 3 hour drive from Portland?  Why is that relevant?  Well, the Red Sox were playing the Mariners so Saturday afternoon we drove up to Safeco field and saw the game.  Saturday morning we met Mik (a guy Jessie had been talking to on IM since Australia) and wandered around the city.  We went to the Saturday Market which is an outdoor market with food, drinks, clothes and artwork.  I had a Rogue summer beer and got a few cool things from the market.  We ate breakfast and lunch at the same vegetarian restaurant and then headed off to Seattle.  Safeco is a nice stadium, the view from the seats was very good, we had row 1 in the upper deck so we had a great view.  The only problem I had with the stadium was that when you were not at your seat I felt very away from the game, you could not see the field from any of the concourses.  The food was good, I had an Ichiroll which is a really spicy tuna maki roll, it was so spicy I almost couldn’t eat it.  One really cool thing about this stadium is that they had the ability to order food from your seat, you could do this on your Nintendo DS (Mariners are owned by Nintendo) or your Verizon phone via text messages.  The other nice thing (hope you’re not surprised) is that they serve Starbucks coffee instead of Dunkin Donuts.  I had a few different beers at the stadium including a Pyramid Amber Ale which was really good.  Speaking of Pyramid, they had a brew house across the street from the stadium which we went to after the game.  I had a summer brew from there which was also very good. 

We didn’t get back to the hotel till after 2am and had to get up at 4am so we could get to the airport in time for our 8am flight..  At the airport in Portland we went to the Rogue brew house and had a pre-flight drink and breakfast which included Kobe beef meatballs with blue cheese inside them.  At the Detroit airport I had my mid-day Murphy’s Irish Stout..  Got back to CT and ate at the Japanese restaurant in Willimantic before finally getting home to pass out..

----
Portland is a really cool city, it's very laid back and very spread out.  There are no really big sky scrapers and there is a bunch of greenery in the city.  The ride to Seattle was amazing, there was this enormous snow caped mountain off in the horizon and the road was lined with big hills and enormous trees!  I can see why people love it out there, I wish I had more time (and healed feet) so I could go hiking and enjoy the lovely surroundings.  I would like go back there when I have time to just veg in the wilderness for a few days.