Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Travel

  • San Diego or bust

    We’ll be on the road all next week—well, starting this week, really, since we’re leaving Friday night—on our way to visit my brother in San Diego. Road trip!

    From Bend, San Diego is about a 16 or 17 hour drive. Since the kids are little, we’re spreading that over three days each way, taking it easier than just plowing on through. Of course, the portable DVD player we bought for the car should help out, too.

    Needless to say, I’ll be mostly offline for nine or ten days, starting Friday afternoon. I have a slightly older laptop computer that I’m taking, but I just got it and it doesn’t have network access, either Ethernet or wireless (has the slots for them, though). I may be able to get it set up for network before we go, otherwise I’ll just rely on the modem in a pinch.

    Or not. We’ll just see.

  • Greyhound quits Bend

    As reported on Bend.com, Greyhound is leaving Central Oregon:

    It is eliminating 260 stops, leaving 99 in the 13-state region.

    In Oregon, the list of 35 communities losing Greyhound service ranges (alphabetically) from Albany to Zigzag, with Bend, Klamath Falls, La Pine, Madras, Redmond and Warm Springs among those in the middle.

    Too bad. I suppose it’s a bit odd to lament the loss of a transportation service that’s in decline and is (let’s face it) mediocre at best, but I have some fond memories of Greyhound. For instance, growing up, every year my grandparents in Portland would ship our Christmas presents in a big package via Greyhound. And they were the best presents; they always got us the cool toys and video games.

    (Strange in this day and age of UPS and FedEx everywhere that people would send packages via Greyhound, of all things, but there it is.)

    Or the time my brother, when he was still living in Portland, made a surprise trip to visit the family on his birthday. I was in on it; he made an evening call and had us pick him up at the bus station around 10:30 that same night, and then surprised everyone the next day. That was a helluva lot of fun.

    I even remember when the Greyhound station was downtown on the corner of Greenwood and Wall—when they had an actual station instead of sharing a gas station somewhere (as they’d been doing the last few years).

    Ah, well. It’s a shame.

  • Zoo

    This weekend we were in Portland, visiting the Zoo and hanging out with our friends Justin and Raegan. It was a good trip, but damn hot; fortunately, we had brought the kids’ wagon along and I pulled them around the Zoo rather than having them walk/run everywhere in the heat. They had a great time.

    And that Saturday night we had barbecued pork chops and cold beer. The perfect end to a good (hot!) day.

  • San Francisco Trip, Day 3

    Ha, fooled you. The third day of the trip was pretty basic: caught the hotel shuttle to the airport, caught the airplane, made it home.

    Okay, well, something happened: when we got to the airport, we found out that the corkscrew we had bought the day before at Viansa Winery would be taken away if we tried to board the plane with it (really!), so we ended up having to check one of our bags and put the corkscrew in it. I mean, really. A corkscrew?

    Oh, and when we got back to Bend, we killed a few extra hours by going to see Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. It was fun; not an Academy Award winner certainly, but a lot more fun than a lot of the dreck making it to the big screen these days.

  • San Francisco Trip, Day 2

    Saturday the 12th in Frisco was the busy day; we took the Napa Valley Wine Train, which ate up about 8 hours.

    It was a lot of fun. The tour bus that took us to Napa only had 3 other couples on it, so there were 8 of us total. The driver was a really good tour guide, named Roberto, with an accent that I couldn’t quite peg; I knew it wasn’t Spanish, so I had settled on Italian, but he ultimately revealed himself to be Portugese. On the way to Napa he detoured through Sonoma (he does that on weekends, because the train leaves later and there’s an extra couple of hours to do this kind of stuff. So take the Wine Train on Saturdays) and stopped at the Viansa Winery. We toured the Winery, tasted a lot of really good wine, and bought a few things. We ended up with 3 bottles of wine to take with us, and signed up for 4 months of their Tuscan Club. Very good detour.

    The Wine Train itself was cool; I get a kick out of trains, seeming to me to be very retro and luxurious in a sort of pre-Depression American-decadence way, I don’t know. This train pretty much carves a straight line through Napa and back, covering about 3 hours, and you are served a very nice lunch with wine, dessert, etc. While you’re waiting for your meal (or after the meal; they do it in 2 shifts— we were the second shift), you can wander among the various cars, sit in a lounge car, view the scenery from an observation deck, taste wine, that sort of thing. Like I said, I get a kick out of riding a train, and I think it would be neat sometime to ride cross-country in one, just to do it.

    Roberto drove us back to San Francisco, of course, and on the way back he took us up to a great vantage point overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge in the Golden Gate Recreation Area. Amazing view, only marred by the number of people already there, taking in the view themselves.

    It’s such a charming city; I’d only been there once before, when I was 16, and we were simply passing through on a foggy day. It’s an area I’d consider living in, if I didn’t have other things going on right now that require staying put in Bend.

    The rest of the day after we got back was spent doing some more shopping, unwinding, and having dinner in a nice little Italian place at the hotel, called Cafe Pescatore. I was pretty beat by the end of the day, and during dinner I noticed a funny phenomenon: the day spent riding a train and in a tour van had tricked out my inner ear so that it seemed like solid ground was still rocking like the train—phantom movements, as it were. The same occurence that happens when you’ve been out on a boat in the ocean for a long period and have trouble finding your “land legs” again. Very interesting.

  • San Francisco Trip, Day 1

    Herewith the beginning of several entries detailing our anniversary trip to San Francisco last weekend (the 11th through the 13th).

    It was a good trip! We had to get up too early, though: five in the morning on Friday, so we could be at the airport by 6 or so (our flight was 7:15). I always dread traveling when I have to get up early, but this time it wasn’t too bad.

    It was a good flight though, quick and without incident. We had everything we needed in carry-ons, so we didn’t have to worry about checking luggage. So we were able to go straight from the airport to our hotel, the Tuscan Inn, even though it was too early to check in. We left our bags with the hotel and wandered around the Fisherman’s Wharf area of San Francisco.

    It was cold, too; we had just come from 90+ degree weather in Bend, to 70-ish degree wind and fog. Fortunately, it cleared up later in the day and warmed up.

    Non-sequitous side note: the biggest and most interesting culture shock moment for me was seeing billboards advertising programming languages and platforms, like J2EE, Enterprise JavaBeans, stuff like that; I’m used to the “mainstream” billboards we have around here (you know, real estate, cars, etc.) and forgot that we were visiting one of the most wired cities in the world. What can I say? I’m still a country boy when you get down to it.

    A good part of the afternoon was shopping at Pier 39, which, as I sit here thinking about it, isn’t really all that exciting. So I’ll skip ahead to dinner.

    Friday night we did the Hornblower dinner cruise. It was very, very nice (very similar to the Portland dinner cruise we did last year). It was a three hour cruise of the Bay: you swing by Alcatraz, around Angel Island, skirt Sausalito, pass under the Golden Gate Bridge, cruise back down past the Bay Bridge and finally back to dock. Excellent food, wine, service; an all-around good choice. We had a great time.

    Funny story, too: at the table next to us, a young couple were having dinner and bickering a lot. The girl seemed older than the boy (it was his 25th birthday, as it turned out), and she was pretty, but I can’t guess what their deal was. I said “funny,” it’s getting there. One of the things they were arguing about was the boy quitting smoking—I think. He was “only” smoking a cigarette a day, but he was passionately trying to make the claim that “all” writers smoked, drank, did drugs, etc., were basically messed up in the head.

    All writers? I resisted the temptation to step in and correct him. It was starting to seem obvious by this time the guy was making a play with his girlfriend/spouse/significant other to get permission to party more. Because, of course, he wants to be a writer, and all writers smoke a lot, drink like fish, etc. etc.

    Yeah, I know. But it gets better.

    A little later, we start getting to the root of the problem. This is a direct quote, believe it or not, and I’m emphasizing just as he did: “I’m 25 years old and I write children’s books. Children’s books! Do you have any idea how unsexy that is?”

    Swear to god. He actually used the word “unsexy” like that. I had to fight back laughter; I couldn’t hide my smile, so I had turned away. I think one of the first thoughts that went through my head was something along the lines of, At least he’s not equating “children” with “sexy.”

    Pathetic. So he wants to be a writer, a “serious” writer, one wracked with angst and depression that only nicotine and the bottle can dull long enough to produce brilliant literary prose. You know, like every “serious” writer. But he writes children’s books, which is about as far away from the stereotype he’s so desperately seeking that it’s driving him crazy.

    I hope he’s reading this, because: Get the hell over yourself. Writers don’t sit around whining about how unfair it is that they can’t write what they want, or that their lifestyle doesn’t measure up to their skewed vision of what they should be: they write. And if you really do write children’s books for a living, then you’ve already got a huge step up: you’re a published, professional writer. That’s huge in the publishing world. You’ve got instant cred, instant advantage over every other up-and-comer. So shut the hell up and write, and I don’t want to hear whiny, self-piteous shit about how unfair you think life is being because you won’t take the time to actually write what you want to write.

    One more thing. Don’t knock children’s books. They’re hard to write. I should know. I have children.

    Okay, my rant is over. I feel better.

    So, to recap: Friday in San Francisco was good, cold in the morning, nice later, did shopping, and a dinner cruise. All went well. My next entry should deal with the rest of our trip, so stay tuned.

  • San Francisco

    This weekend my wife and I are going to San Francisco for our (5th) anniversary trip. Leaving early early early Friday morning, coming back Sunday. It should be a fun trip.

    Friday night we’re doing a dinner cruise of the Bay, and all day Saturday we’re taking a train tour through wine country. Ah, le vin.

    Of course, I’d love to be able to stop in at Anchor Brewing, but we don’t have the time. Bummer!

  • What are all the colors of the rainbow?

    Our trip to Portland today was definitely one of the odder ones.

    In short: The good news is, Kaitlyn’s eyes are as good as they’re going to get, according to the doctor, which is pretty damn good. No more surgeries. The bad news is, the doctor recommended a second eye surgery for Brandon, before he turns 2 if possible. Definitely not what we want to hear.

    As for the (gory) details of the trip, this is a doozy: Brandon threw up on himself and he and the car smelled like puke the rest of the day. We had to buy him a new shirt at Goodwill because the one he was wearing stank so bad.

    Then Sherri managed to spill a bunch of orange juice all over her lap and seat while trying to fill the kids’ cups with juice. That wasn’t as bad as the vomit, though.

    After the eye doctor we went to the Lloyd Center Mall and had a highly mediocre cheesesteak lunch from a food court restaurant called Steak Escape (yes, they actually have a website).

    On the drive home, we saw the brightest rainbow I have ever seen when driving through Madras. I wish I could have taken a picture of it; it was truly spectacular and almost made it all worth it.

    Incidentally, the answer to the question in the title is: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (purple). Seven colors. Sherri didn’t believe me that there are 7 colors and that indigo was counted, until we got home and she looked it up online.

  • There and back again

    We just got back yesterday from a week-long vacation on the Oregon Coast. I should say, “We just got back and recovered,” because a week in hotels with young children is taxing. But, it was a good trip.

    We started out in Newport, and the weather for the first few days was crappy: chilly, foggy, wet. Consequently, I started getting a cold and had to drink tea and take echinacea for a few days. But we found things to do before hitting the beach anyway; we visited Lincoln City for some shopping, wandered along the stores on the bayfront, enjoyed good food. We had lunch at the Rogue Brewery in Southbeach, but I couldn’t drink any beer because I was at the peak of my sore throat! How can you visit one of the best breweries on the west coast and NOT drink beer?

    Our last day in Newport, the weather turned nice, and after a great breakfast (marionberry French toast), we spent time on the beach. The kids had a fantastic time. After that, we moved on to Florence for a night.

    I’m not too crazy about Florence; it’s kind of a dingy town with a worn-out feeling. We visited Old Town Florence (decent shopping and eating), and went to the Sea Lion Caves about 11 miles north. That was impressive; you take an elevator 200 feet down into the largest sea cave in the world to see the sea lions on the rocks.

    After Florence we moved on to Bandon, on the southern Oregon coast. I like Bandon; it’s a charming, tiny little town that I can picture myself living in some day. There’s not much around there, though; the largest towns are Coos Bay and North Bend to the north, which aren’t saying much. I hear people mostly like to leave Coos Bay.

    Finally we drove over to Roseburg (not on the coast, but close enough) and visited the Wildlife Safari there, and the La Garza winery. The Wildlife Safari was fun; I’d been there years and years ago, as a teen. Kaitlyn and I rode an elephant, which was very cool.

    We got back yesterday (Friday), spent a good part of the time getting unpacked, doing laundry and recovering. I’ve gotten caught up on everything, and getting geared to start my new job up this next week, on Tuesday. We’ve got office space, I’ve got a desk and three chairs that need assembling, and a computer.

    Should be interesting.

  • Portland recap; To-do list

    Portland was really good. We picked a good hotel this time (we’ve stayed in some real dives) and the Portland Spirit dinner cruise was fantastic. I’d highly recommend anyone looking for something nice to do in Portland, check this out.

    TODO list for chuggnutt.com:

    • Get blog search working
    • Get the featured “Check it Out” link-thing working, so it rotates through actual links rather than just the one
    • Drop in some more pages of content
    • Uhm… more links?