Being Single Is Great – But There’s A Lonely Price
Single? Happy? Despite your awesome life, do you get lonely? Have you answered yes to all 3?
COME SIT BY ME. puts kettle on
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Tag Archives: travel blogger
The Set-In-My-Ways Danger Zone
Something hit me recently, and it wasn’t a joyous revelation. I realised that I may have developed a wee crush on someone.
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When J-Ro Went To Portland….Part 5
Southeast Grind, my second home in PDX!
My first Portland Sunday was a proper day of rest (The Lord himself would have been delighted with me). I was completely cream crackered, having been on the go since I arrived and not really paying any attention to the spectre of jet lag that was hovering around me. It eventually walloped me upside the head and rendered me incapable of any sort of forward motion or day-planning, so I just threw on some threads, loaded up my backpack like Dora the Explorer, and headed over to Southeast Grind, my unofficial Base of Operations for things to do in Portland (click here to read about why I loved this place so much).
I pretty much decided I was going to plant my tired old self there for the day, but first I had to grab something to eat, and being as wrecked and fuzzy-brained as I was, I chose to fall up the road and go to Jack In The Box, an American fast food franchise outlet. It wasn’t the smartest decision I’ve ever made. I hated it. I’d been pretty fussy and paranoid about food since I’d arrived in the States (it’s a long-standing issue that I won’t bore you with in THIS article anyway), and I think I’d had a pre-existing notion about how the chicken teriyaki rice & veg bowl I’d ordered would taste…and it didn’t deliver. I was bitterly disappointed, pretty much all of the things I’d eaten that looked familiar to me all tasted just that little bit different to how I’d expected them to taste, so in my mind I couldn’t ingest them. I chewed grumpily on the twisty fries I’d also ordered instead. At least they tasted like I thought they would. I also tried to make a dent in what was certainly the largest liquid-carrying vessel for one person I’ve ever seen. It went waaay beyond ‘Go Large’…they called it The Quencher. I could barely hold it in one hand without being terrified I’d drop it. I’m surprised it didn’t come with armbands and a fucking lifeguard.
Literally Me.
It’s safe to say that Jack In The Box isn’t exactly gourmet fusion cuisine for foodies. Thus, I was Jack’s complete lack of surprise when I found that I’d basically left the whole thing and, despite the best efforts of my kidneys and bladder, the remaining two-thirds of the bucket o’ fizz I’d stupidly said ‘yes’ to. I noticed that there was a guy outside the main doors who looked a bit out of it, and was rooting through the fast food joint’s bins outside. I looked at my tray and instantly felt like a complete asshole for contemplating chucking out so much food. So ninja-style, I gathered the bowl of chicken and rice and The Quencher and sidled out the door without the staff seeing me, and I gave them to the guy with a brief disclaimer of “the food is fine, I was just full” in case he thought I was trying to pass off something that had gone bad. As it turned out, he barely registered me and just muttered something unintelligible as he took the food off me in a complete daze and shuffled away. I didn’t really mind; I was just glad SOMEONE was enjoying the food and it wasn’t wasted. Pay it forward and all that.
But it got me thinking as I left Jack In The Box and strolled the short distance to Southeast Grind. I was about to put down roots for a few hours in a lovely place with some nice tea and maybe a treat of some kind, tap-tapping away on my new laptop in a foreign country I’d been able to travel to for a holiday, feeling happy as a clam; so I took stock and felt so incredibly grateful to have the life that I have, that I’m able to find contentment in the everyday things I do (when my mental health is being managed properly obviously).
A mini shanty-town set up at the junction of two streets next to a main road. The white object directly under the tree on the left-hand side is an umbrella for shelter & shade.
The problem of homelessness is a massive one in Portland, from what I’ve seen first-hand and from what some locals have told me. Maybe it’s because the population is roughly ten times that of Limerick, but it’s very visible and in a very unfamiliar way to me. I took a couple of pictures (see above and below) of the setups I saw dotted throughout the city centre and the suburbs that you would never see out on the streets of Limerick.
This is a slip road coming off a freeway where cars roar past at full speed. I’m standing across the road from the zebra crossing to take a pic of this particular camp, because it actually takes up a big portion of the footpath.
Look; anyone with a molecule of common sense knows that there are homeless people in every city, and Limerick is most certainly no exception. I’m not blind to it in my hometown by any means, and this isn’t a preachy bleeding-heart post telling people what to do or anything like that. It’s just me observing the different forms that homelessness takes wherever you go depending on population and city size. I’ve never seen anything like those mini tent townships; as fantastic as Portland was, that was definitely something that has stayed with me. That and the incredibly wide demographic of people affected; young, old, disabled, war veterans, addicts, men, women…nobody seemed immune. Which is a scary-ass thought. There but for the grace of circumstance go I.
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When J-Ro Went To Portland…Part 4 (In which Bigfoot escapes me)
My first Portlandian Saturday rolled around, and I had the biggest of plans. My original POA had been to head to Skamania County (what a rapid name) and take in the delights and wonders of The Bigfoot Bash n’ Bounty. That’s right; I was heading in search of Bigfoot – or at least a bunch of cheesy imitations and gimmicky tourist souvenirs. It shouldn’t be too hard to get there, I thought. After all, this was America.
Oh, how wrong I was. I spent HOURS Google mapping, Amtrak-ing, Greyhound Bus-ing every which way i could think of online the night before, desperately trying to work out a public transport route to get there and back. Skamania County was in Washington, Oregon’s neighbouring state, but it might as well have been in the Australian Outback. There was no way in the laws of physics I was going to make it. So after much deliberation, I had to abandon ship. In an ironic twist, the Bigfoot festival was proving to be just as inaccessible as the creature that inspired it. Bastard.
When I awoke on the Saturday morning at 6.30am (THANKS JETLAG) I decided that today was the day I would head to the RV & Motorhome show in the Portland Expo Center. As trips go, this would prove to be the easiest peasiest journey ever, compared to the epic journey of the backroads and side-roads that the Bigfoot Festival would have conjured up. A friend had suggested Craigslist for ride-sharing, but I vetoed the crap out of it because NO FUCKING WAY ARE YOU KIDDING ME THEY STILL HAVEN’T FOUND THE SERIAL KILLER WHO’S NAMED AFTER IT SO I THINK I’LL PASS OKAYTHANXBYE
By this stage I was getting used to the MAX (the Portland version of the LUAS), and hopped on it & headed to the Portland Expo Center, where my eyes were treated to some of the maddest-looking yokes that ever graced a road. I was extremely disappointed to find out that for all of their hidden sections and expanding compartments, not one single RV turned out to be an actual Transformer. I wish someone had told me at the beginning, though. I’d spent a full fifteen minutes chatting up this rather hunky red, blue & chrome motorhome in the hope that it was Optimus Prime having some chill time. Alas, it was not meant to be. However, the guy sitting behind the wheel in said motorhome now thinks he has a sleazy Irish girlfriend; so, there’s that, I suppose…
I was sort of hoping for a more rustic affair, packed with a load of motorhome enthusiasts named Dale and / or Earl strolling around in all their Sunday camping finery, smugly showing off their pride n’ joy while their wives Martha or Darlene tut-tutted and left them to it. Nope. It was a giant venue full of the newest and shiniest that the RV world has to offer the discerning retired whoever who has $60k and upwards to chuck around. It was still very cool to check out though. As quaint as it sounds, there’s no way on this green earth any one of these monstrous vehicles could ever negotiate Irish country roads, they were wider than two high-rise car park spaces. These yokes were definitely made for the wide open American road. Looking inside them, I realised they were nicer than some houses I’ve been in. Them Yanks take their driving & camping holidays seriously.
There were still some camper vans that hearkened back to a bygone age with the classic VW hippy vans getting a nod from an American company who had bought the license from Volkswagen and so went ahead and made some really cool small VW-inspired vans, complete with retro interior. I TOTALLY wanted one.
Tell me you wouldn’t want to cruise the open road in something like THIS…
The high point of the day was when I got chatting to an Argentinian RV salesman who, when I told him I was Irish, said to me “Ah the Irish are cool, I’ve got a few friends from there – we hate the Brits as much as you guys do.” I leaned in and whispered “Falklands?” and he nodded, smiling. “Got it in one!” We parted ways, laughing heartily and muttering obscenities about Thatcher.
So ended my day trip to the world of RV madness. I was exhausted by mid-afternoon, having been walloped upside the head by a jet-lag shaped baseball bat, which was how I ended up getting my bearings all mixed up and going waaay too far on the MAX line that was supposed to take me home. I wasn’t too stressed about it, I didn’t have anywhere in particular to be and sometimes it’s nice to get lost in a place, sometimes weird and strange things happen. Which is precisely what did happen.
I eventually worked out at which stop I had to get off, so I waited for the next train to arrive. This being Portland, it was like five minutes, bless ’em. No sooner had I gotten on the Orange line back the way I came, when, at the next stop, who should get on but Colton McBride, he of the gentle Goth persuasion I wrote about in my previous post (click here). Given the randomness of me ending up where I did and how big a city Portland is, I was genuinely surprised at the coincidence. He looked the exact same, apart from being makeup-free. He also seemed a bit more ‘with it’, and didn’t recognise me at all, even when he sat across from me and asked if this was the Orange line. I decided to leave him be. As ‘with it’ as he was, he still clutched his Victorian china doll reverently, fixing her hair and her dress, making sure she was neat and tidy, chatting with a woman who asked him where he’d gotten the doll (nothing surprises me here, it’s Portland) and telling her he’d found her in a thrift store for $3. Fair play to him.
Well if that don’t put the ‘dink’ in ‘co-inky-dink’…
I didn’t push to remind him that we’d met, I just answered his questions about which train it was, and he smiled and went back to making sure his doll was looking presentable. I took a sneaky pic to prove that I’d met him again so that when I wrote about our second encounter I’d have proof that life can be very odd sometimes, and my wondering about the welfare of Colton had somehow prompted the Universe to put him in my pathway once more so I’d see he was doing okay. The fact that he had no makeup on told me that at the very least he’d had an opportunity somewhere to clean himself up, so maybe he wasn’t as badly off as I had initially thought. But who’s to know? At least I got to see him one more time. Cheers Colton!
(tune in next time, when I laze around Southeast Grind thinking about stuff, then I visit the largest bookstore IN THE WORLD)
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When J-Ro Went to Portland….Part 3 (An Encounter With Colton McBride)
Colton McBride (Sept 2015) – The Undisputed Goth King of Portland
****UPDATE APRIL 2018**** Colton has been spotted frequently the last few days, last seen last night in Macon Illinois. For anyone searching for him, there is some info in the comments section of this blog post. I hope he and his family are reunited very soon.
