Portland

We spent the first few days in Portland with another very friendly and hospitable couch surfer, in the South East part of town.  There was enough entertainment for the first couple of days just wandering round parks and streets of weird shops and independent cafes.  Portland's got much more of a personality of it's own than Seattle, a feeling of being in a particular place.  Yes, it's very cool, and borderline smug in places.  But at least it's got something to be smug about, with an interesting history, some genuinely alternative places (such as the very cool library run from the office of Bitch Media, a magazine/collective that anyone with a passing interest in feminism should look up- and probably show to people who think they don't need to have an interest :p), and some really tasty beer.  More microbreweries per head than any other US city.

On Friday we spent a long time abusing the free internet and munching tasty food at the city's oldest worker-owned co-operative cafe, and then went to see this film at a very cool feminist community centre.  It's a very distressing film, even more so than The Invisible War, even for people with no personal experiences to be triggered- but it's distressing because it's very real, and is well worth watching if you can find it.

Our couch surf wasn't home after Friday, and we had no luck finding another one, so merrily set off wandering the streets of Portland with our rucksacks like little snails.  We were intending to find somewhere to camp as we've done before, but when wandering past city hall we discovered rows of tents and sleeping bags, some hand-drawn signs, the sound of an acoustic guitar, a handful of well-meaning but quite bonkers folk, and several who appeared sane but weren't wearing shoes.  Oh yes, we'd stumbled into an Occupy.

We shouldn't really mock, as we camped there the next four nights, after they enticed us with free food.  Not that most food in Portland isn't free, really (warning for those more easily ashamed relatives, you may not want to read the next bit :D).  'Food Carts' are a really big thing there: basically no one can afford shops, so there's a tradition of buying the little wheely burger van type things, and then setting them up in clusters all over the city.  And the food is pretty good, reasonably priced, varied, and from all over the world- Ethiopia to Argentina to Scotland to 'Big Ass Sandwiches' and everything in between.  We ate all these, plus falafel, curry, chinese... the list goes on.  And we got all of it from the bins in squares where  people sit to eat, and then routinely discard about half of their meal (once there was even vino tinto! - C).  This stuff is minutes not hours old and still has lots of the good bits left.  We ate far more than we could have afforded, and got to try a bit of everything.

Over the weekend we explored the market, and roamed around town a bit more (including the world's smallest official city park:

and the world's second largest beaten bronze statue (first is the Statue of Liberty), Portlandia:

Don't trust the 'reaching out to help you' hand, the other one has a 20 foot long trident in it.

)- but mostly spent our time at Powell's, the worlds largest independent used bookstore.  They have to give away maps at the door.  You can get lost in there really easily, but it'd be fine, you'd just live in the shelves and read as many as you could of the over 1,000,000 books they have in stock.  Sadly, with the rucksacks we weren't small enough to try and conceal ourselves and set up home there or you'd probably never have heard from us again.  They also run some really good authors and speakers events, and we stayed to see a talk on Monday night before hitching off on Tuesday morning.

Hitting the road again always makes you smile.  The longer the road the better, destination unimportant, spirits high, out of tune Frank Turner carolled loudly at seven thirty AM.  Can't help it.  And hitching is great, if you just take the side of the road time for what it is.  There's few moments quite as romantic and compelling as a car pulling into your dusty layby, with who-knows-who going who-knows-where inside.

Yeah, yeah, I know, hippy ramblings.  Sorry folks- J

Four rides brought us out to Boise, Idaho.  State of C's dreams. *Interjection* I am not often compared to Martin Luther King.  He was a black preacher from the South and an inspiring voice of a generation.  I am none of these things.  But I too have a dream. And unlike Dr King's, mine has come true for we are in Idaho! (Not that his shouldn't let me be clear, but it hasn't). - C

Our host here is a librarian and we had a great geeky chat about books once we arrived.  The drive here was amazing.  Suddenly the air is not only hot but dry, and the scenery changed to desert and then farmlands, hardly recognisable as the same country as West Oregon.