The Byways of Dallas

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Sometimes the road less traveled...

Sometimes the road less traveled...

Dallas, Texas is all together different from Oregon. Goodbye green, hello brown. Goodbye wooded mountains, hello scrubby flatlands. Goodbye rain, hello warm weather and sunny skies. So it’s not all bad.

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”.

Eugenius!!!

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PRI - Pizza. Research. Institute.

PRI - Pizza. Research. Institute.

Our friends Deb and Craig moved out to Eugene, Oregon a couple of years a go and we’ve never visited them. Why? Many reasons, theres nothing even resembling a direct flight to Eugene from DC. We were busily preparing for this trip a good part of the time they have been out there. And, I am highly allergic to Hippies.

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.

Rose City Welcomes You

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Smells Like a Rose Too

Smells Like a Rose Too

Having flights left on our OneWorld Ticket and friends in Oregon to visit we headed off to PDX. Portland, with it’s rivers and bridges, it’s mountains, manageable city size (and professional soccer team), has long been near the top of the relocation list for LeeAnne and I. In all honesty at the beginning of the trip I thought we may be looking to move out there when we returned to the States. But being away from everyone you know for the better part of a year changes what you want sometimes, and at the moment I don’t think we want to move to a new city, make new friends, and start things all over. We’ve kind of been doing that every three to four days for the last year.

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.