Occupy Portland

The day started off with Chris and myself (Alexei) taking the car out for an oil change. This earned us a free Ultimate Car Wash, which consisted of giant mechanical arms spraying a dozen different things on the car in sequence, including the following rainbow spray:

That out of the way, we returned to the hotel, packed up and headed back to the USA. Unfortunately, as it was the Saturday of a long weekend, traffic was terrible. The border crossing took almost an hour and another accident on the road also slowed things down to a crawl on a 10 km segment of the highway.

While on the road, we decided to stop for food and gas and noticed there was a T-Mobile there too. We tried to see if we could upgrade our plan to get more data at higher than 2G speeds, but apparently it was something that was impossible for them to do for an existing month without getting a completely new plan.

For dinner, we stopped at Olive Garden, which was offering an "unlimited plate of pasta" - an offer that was expiring the next day. Of course, we decided to all go for it, selecting different options for the type of pasta, type of sauce, either unlimited salad or unlimited soup and extra unlimited toppings such as sausages and meat balls. Of course, the initial plates were so big that we didn't end up taking them up on the "unlimited" offer, except, naturally, for Tak who got a second plate, switching up his choices of sauce and noodles on the new plate.

After dining and being stuck in traffic, we decided to head directly to Portland, cancelling our initial plans to make another stop at Seattle to ride the monorail. The drive to Portland was rather uneventful and we arrived late in the evening. Since the plans called for leaving Portland early the next morning, the only chance to see the city was that night. Despite Chris' reluctance, we decided to drive down to explore Portland's downtown area.

Little did we know that there was an Occupy Portland protest earlier that day as it was the anniversary of the initial protests a year ago.

We wandered out and about around the downtown area of Portland. Some of the interesting things we saw included really some nice Portland trams and a circa-1911 steam-powered fire engine that was on display at a fire station:

We also saw quite a lot of nightlife activity, with lots of bars and clubs being full of people. There were also quite a number of homeless and generally sketchy-looking people (probably remnants of the protest from earlier that day), who were making Chris quite uncomfortable.

After wandering for a while and not finding a place to eat that was both open and not super fancy, we decided to head back to the hotel. As we were getting into the car from the parking lot, Chris happened to notice some policemen below pulling out some rifles from the trunk of the car. We hastily proceeded to drive out of the area and decided to have a meal at a 24-hour Pie restaurant near our hotel, where we had delicious pies and Tak and I split a German-style pretzel burger:

The pies and pretzel burger were delicious.