If you can make it there...

What did we do? Not much, visited with our friend Karen and I like to think we did a self-guided walking tour of Brooklyn and Manhattan. But mostly we just hung out and walked around the city for a few days. Neither of us has been here in a while and it was fun to see how the city has changed.

I have to say that we did have one remarkable accomplishment that should not pass without mention. Nowhere on our trip did we stoop so low, in our travels around the world not once did we even think of doing this, until we got here. We piggy-backed off of someone else bumming off of the kindness of their relatives. If you will:

New York hotels are expensive and we just didn’t want to throw down very much cash when we came up here, so somehow we made arrangements to stay with our friend Karen from DC, who is living with her sister in Brooklyn. On the first read through that may not sink in, but we bummed off of someone that was already bumming off of someone – in a New York apartment! It was cozy up in there, but we made it work. Feeling this something of a masterstroke in the art of traveling it is now entirely appropriate that we go victoriously back to DC.

Sometimes the road less traveled...

If Portland was the City of Roses I suppose Dallas has to be the City of Byways. They love a road here, and not just roads – Highway, Parkway, Tollway, Freeway, Expressway, Turnpike – Dallas has them all, no shortages of roads, cars or traffic here.

We’re in town to visit LeeAnne’s brother and his family, and since they are getting ready to move to Houston, we figured we’d better hop to it and do some Dallas sightseeing. Dealey Plaza, where Dallas was founded and President Kennedy was shot was on the list. We visited the “Sixth Floor Museum” dedicated to the events in and around the shooting. We tried to visit the adjacent “Conspiracy Museum” but were told that it is permanently closed (Possibly that is part of the conspiracy as well). We visited Deep Ellum. We experimented with the Tollway versus the Freeway. We drove through a few toll gates that maybe we shouldn’t have driven through and we drove back to Frisco and hung out with LeeAnne’s Fam.

There was a day trip to Austin, but I have to say, aside from the Tacos (which are of very high quality), and the Texas Thrift Store (also of the highest quality), Austin was kind of a letdown. Maybe we should have saved the trip for SxSW, maybe we should have gone to a taping of “Austin City Limits”, maybe we should have just gone Two-Stepping, but we were a bit underwhelmed.

Maybe the most notable part of this leg of our trip is that we are now officially done with our OneWorld tickets! By the paper tickets we’ve had with us since January, we were suppose to fly to Auckland via LA on Oct. 29, but we are headed back to DC. Is the trip over? Kind of. We may go up to New York for a few days, let’s call that “The End”.

PRI - Pizza. Research. Institute.

Of course, being only a few hours north in Portland we were obliged to pay them a visit, they are some of our best friends after all, and boy did it paid off big! Details will follow, but hold on a minute while I set the stage.

Eugene is a College Town par excellence. The University of Oregon owns this town and dominates just about every facet of life in it. It is also widely known as the hippy capitol of the Pacific Northwest. I don’t know if it’s old growth forest, the generally laid back lifestyle of people here, or the mushrooms that seem to grow everywhere, but there are tons of them here. To quote Bill Paxton from “Aliens” – “There’s movement all over the place! Game Over Man, Game Over!” Except in Eugene he would be talking about Hippys, not Aliens that would one day go on to fight the Predator – Twice.

One more thing to know – hippies make great food. Ergo, there is a lot of great organic, non-GMO’ed, free range food in Eugene. I will speak of only one of them – the best one in my opinion – the Pizza Research Institute. A high fluting name if you ask me, but what else would you call a pizza place that serves corn-on-the-cob on a pizza? They are out there doing the kind of research that just can’t get funding here on the east coast, maybe one day we will all benefit from their sacrifice.

Anyway, this place is out there – in a good way! The menu has a Periodic Table of Ingredients, complete with a column for the “Noble Vegetables” (they have put some thought into this). And if you go, and you should, do yourself a favor and put yourself in the lovin’ hands of the Chef and order a Chef’s Special. Fifteen (15) ingredients of the chef’s choosing on one pie. If listed out, the strange combinations would turn off most people (Peaches and Walnuts on a pizza, egad man!), but when administered by these Researches, it all works.

If you go to Eugene, go to the Pizza Research Institute. Call Craig and Deb and see if they can join you, but go to PRI for the love of Pete.

Smells Like a Rose Too

So a visit it is, although our Portland hosts Suzanne and Jeff did offer to hook us up with a real estate agent before we got into town and there was a bit of heavy questioning about just why we wouldn’t be moving to Portland ASAP (FYI – If PDX had an MLS team rather than a minor league soccer team, it would help).

We did many of the Portland “Must Do’s”. We went to Powells City of Books, the book store that takes up a whole city block downtown. We rode bikes in the rain. We ate at Voodoo Doughnuts. We were rained on. We skipped the Rose garden (but we had been there before). And we drank Fair Trade coffee at a vegan bakery from mugs made on site by local peoples with special needs …as it rained outside.

Mark Hanna Slept Here

The village of New Lisbon was founded as a “Canal Town” by one Lewis Kinney in 1802. It’s the second oldest town in Ohio, and home to the oldest stone house in the state. Soon after it’s founding it became a center for iron and whiskey production and the population boomed from zero to over four thousand in it’s first decade of existence. That rate of growth wouldn’t long continue, as Lisbon’s population plateaued at near four thousand for the next two hundred years or so.

During the War of Northern Aggression the feared Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan was captured outside Lisbon after crossing the Ohio River and leading raids on various sites in Indiana and Ohio. Attempting to join his forces with General Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, he – like many others over the years – could not find a way out of Columbiana County. During this time Lisbon was an active site on the Underground Railroad, and there was a strongly abolitionist newspaper published from Lisbon – there were many Abolitionists in and around the village.

But the two names that connect Lisbon with US political history are Mark Hanna and John McKinnley. McKinnley, the twenty-fifth President of the United States lived in Lisbon briefly with his grand parents. And while they met elsewhere, it was the political alliance John McKinnley formed with Lisbon native Mark Hanna that would shape both of their careers, and redefine political campaigns in the United States.

Think of McKinnley as a 19th century version of George Bush to Mark Hanna’s Karl Rove. Something of a twit, McKinnley looked to Hanna to organize his 1896 campaign against William Jennings Bryan. Hanna raised an unprecedented amount of money and used it to organize one of the first truly national political campaigns in this country. As a result McKinnley thrashed Bryan in the polls and the new administration used it’s mandate in it’s first four years to focus on putting corporate interests ahead of the national interest, and administering the Spanish-American War – the first war Americans would fight off the North American continent. During much of this time the President would rely on Mark Hanna for many of his most important decisions. Hmm, sound familiar to anyone?

Of course, McKinnley was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901 and he was succeeded by Teddy Roosevelt as President. Hanna and Roosevelt had long before had a falling out and the Lisbon Gang’s influence soon faded. The town just hasn’t been the same since. So one way of looking at it is this, without Lisbon, and Mark Hanna, would there be any Karl Rove or Spanish American War? Without a Spanish American War would there be a Mount Rushmore with Teddy Roosevelts face on it?

Lisbon, it’s Hysterical Historical.