The City of Roses

Backtracking again to Portland, we did an “Encore Performance” at Eclectic Home Furnishings. (Flying Cloud on Display at Eclectic Home)The shop is located in area known as the “Alphabet District” either for its alphabetized street names or the soup kitchens, I’m not sure which. In our efforts to stay on the cheap, avoid abusing our friends, and move the Airstream about as little as possible, we decided to just go ahead and spend our nights camped in the parking lot in front of the store. This sounded like a pretty good idea at the time, but we quickly found out that camping on the streets of a major city presents some challenges.

First, city people never go to bed, ever. Second, the later it gets, the louder they talk. Third, when drunk they think nothing of pounding on the side of somebody’s Airstream in the middle of the night and proclaiming at the top of their lungs that it “looks like a f*&#ing spaceship! And last when confronted with a tousle haired man in his pajamas carrying a large bucket of urine, they think nothing of it. We ended up staying five nights here, showing during the day and working on the website at night, and by the end we were pretty well known in the hood!

Once safely out of Portland at last, we headed back up the Columbia River Gorge and we spent a finally uneventful and quiet night by the spectacular waterfalls that grace this area. Without the buses and the sirens, it was kind of hard to get to sleep. We were forced to settle for the babbling of the brook and the hooting of the owls, supported only by the occasional train that rumbled through along the Gorge.