portland weekend recap!

ok so as you know we went to portland last weekend! we were visiting our buddies rachael and justin (of the ruckus fame, it was halloween, justin is currently in an agatha christie play, so it was a busy few days chock full of fun!

we flew on jet blue, and normally telling you about our vacation wouldn't include saying what airline we used because it usually leaves us super-surly. but omg jet blue is the bomb. you know those commercials where the music is superhappy and feelgood and it just makes you all bubbly inside watching it? it's all true! friendly employees! free snacks! leg room for days! tv at every chair so i didn't have to miss the halloween episode of the office! it was fabulous!

ok so our first day there, rachael and justin took josh, gayle and i to a little breakfast joint in downtown milwaukie (where they live). after breakfast we walked around town a little bit, and near the library there were a bunch of ducks engaging in duck butt showing activities:



we also saw possibly the coolest logo ever:



later in the day, justin went to play rehearsal and rachael was cool enough to take us WAY out of the way to the pumpkin patch. this was seriously the high point of our weekend cuz all josh and i wanna do is run away and start a farm. we went through a corn maze, where josh adopted a lonely ear of ground corn and ate almost all the kernels off of it through the course of the rest of the weekend:



after the maze we all hiked out to their pumpkin patch and picked out some faboo pumpkins - my camera's battery died while we were out there so i didn't get to document what our jack-o-lanterns ended up looking like, but rest assured they were awesome!

went home to don halloween costumes to wear to the opening night of justin's play - i had a pocket full of clear plastic rhinestones with me, and every stranger i talked to that night i gave them a handful of "diamonds" and told them very seriously, "these have always brought me luck". and NO ONE knew who i was, which made it that much more awesomely hilarious. the halloween party following the play was also a hoot, lots of good costumes all around! this worked out well, because when josh and i were tasked with coming up with what the no costume penalty would be, the best we could come up with is "you must drink a cup of pee and get raped."




the next day, justin had his play all day and gayle, josh, rachael and i met some of rach's friends for a tour of the shanghai tunnels underneath portland... can't post any pics of that because they watch that stuff like a hawk, but it was kind of sort of more than a little anticlimactic and i don't know if i'd recommend it to a friend... basically you don't see tunnels you see one place's basement and hear a LOT of references to tv shows that talk about tunnels, and way way way way too many little stories that don't necessarily need to be part of a tour. it was fun hanging out with everyone so i wouldn't say it was a total goose egg, but i don't think i would need to go back to that...

sunday started out as a bummer of a day - somewhere in the course of saturday night burroughs the cat got out of the apartment, and it sucked. totally sucked. burroughs is an awesome cat. so we all spent most of the day working on getting him back. he came home that night though, which is completely awesome. (i was way more excited about the cat coming home than i was that i just saw a basement in downtown portland, by the way...) he came home while a bunch of us had gone out to hang out with josh's buddy jerry that he's known since childhood and his wife also named rachel. this is what rachel looks like holding a camoflauged beer:



that night was pretty sweet, we went to a bar called dots in portland and hands down any place that has velvet paintings on the wall = best places on earth! after that we paid a visit to powells books and had our minds blown by the sheer size of it, and finished the night off with a trip to ground kontrol, this bar with a crapload of video games. got to play the elvira and addams family pinball machines, which are my favorite ones ever, so i count that as a win!

came home on monday afternoon, taking the train to the airport was super easy and highly recommended! the flight home was on-time and just as rad as the flight out, so lemme just say again jet blue rools!

that's my story and i'm sticking to it, there's a buttload more pics of this adventure at my flickr page so enjoy!