Portlandia

¡Hola, Mis Amigos! It's Tuesday morning August 2nd. I'm writing from the breakfast room at the Fairfield Inn in Portland, OR. It's been a busy few days since I last wrote. After staying the evening on the Idaho/Washington border, I got up on Saturday with about 12o miles to go to get to Seattle. Friday night, when I was at my campsite I set out to oil my chain as I do most days after riding any significant mileage. Much to my dismay, I discovered some of my chain links were binding up. I spent the rest of the evening attempting to "adjust away" the kinks but it just wasn't happening. So I put my tools away, and decided to just ride my motorcycle to the Holiday Inn in Renton, WA where I'd be staying the night. I was at the hotel four hours too early to check in, so I grabbed my laundry and decided to work on that for a while. As I was washing my clothes I decided to call some nearby motorcycle dealerships to see if any of them had the chain I needed in stock and a service tech available to install it. Fortunately for me Renton Motorcycles was 5 miles from my hotel and had both things I required. I figured it was probably in my best interests to get a new chain rather than ignore it and have it break on me mid trip or even worse, with Miranda on the back. So I rode over to RMC, bought the chain and sprockets, and had them install them. They also went so far as to wash my very dirty machine too.

I was in and out of there in a couple of hours. In the meantime, Laela and Miranda's plane had landed and they had made it to the hotel. I got back there and they were already checked in. It was a very happy reunion. We then went and had a crappy dinner at the restaurant at the hotel. Will I ever learn to NOT eat at a Holiday Inn restaurant?

Sunday we got up and headed into Seattle on the light rail system they had. The hotel had a shuttle to run us over to the station and it took us right downtown. We went to the Space Needle, took a Duck Tour of Seattle, went to a Mariner's game at Safeco Field, went to the fish market, and then had dinner at the Crab Pot. The Pirate store next to the Crap Bot was pretty bad ass and we had a good time perusing it. Miranda was wishing that we could have shopped there before her school musical.

Monday morning we got up and headed out on the road. Since Portland was our next destination, we just hopped on I-5 so we could get there in a straight shot. It took a couple about three hours to get there and when we did we met up with my friend from back in the day, Brian Pickering. It was really nice to be able to catch up with an old friend. It's easily been 16 years since we'd seen each other and there was a lot of catching up to do. He's very knowledgeable about the entire Pacific Northwest Area and had lots of pro-tips for us on things to do and see. He also helped us score a reasonable hotel for the evening which is where I'm writing from right now. Today we're going to visit some bookstore, a donut shop, and Chinatown; after which, we'll hop on US-101 and start making our way down the coast.