Monday, June 18, 2007

Day minus 1 - Travel to Portland

The first step in a long journey started today.

Early flight (overslept a little after a long week of getting up early and staying up late).

Went through the TSA line at Port Columbus three times. They didn’t like my fishing gear bag full of bicycle stuff. First time was for leatherman (oops)… I went back out and mailed it home. Second time was for a 4 oz tube of sun screen that was a ½ oz over the limit. What the label on the container says goes, the fact that half the tube was already out did not matter. The third time was for co2 cartidges. Why they didn’t get all three on the first pass wasn’t clear to me, but I was now in jeapordy of missing my flight and had to ask permission to cut in front of a large number of passengers to get to gate in time. I think I was the last one on, but made it in time.

Two nice flights. First leg to Phoenix, sat next to a nice man named Tom Brown who claimed he called me six months ago and I was helpful, but I couldn’t quite recall the conversation. Maybe he spoke with dad.

Second leg I sat next to a Lasik eye surgeon traveling to Portland from Minneapolis.

The wildest part of the day was sharing a cab to downtown Portland with Tom Moyer. It turns out that Tom owns two condos in downtown Portland and when he found out that I needed a place to stay he offered me the unit he described as his “bunkhouse” to stay the night. The bunkhouse turns out to be a delightful unit with a very nice living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath. Very generous of Tom and I am very grateful for his hospitality. We have way to much in common. We are both 27 year marriage veterans, have 2 kids the same age, we are both the oldest of four kids with two sisters and a brother over ten years younger than ourselves. Kind of wild.

I finally met up with Rich and Sue Simpson who shared their friends Dennis and Nancy with me. We had a wonderful meal at their home and too a brief tour of the city. On the tour Dennis drove us up to the top of a lookout park where two young men on mountain bikes offered to take our group photo. We noticed one of them had a “helment cam” and we negotiated the purchase of his unit for our trip! It seems to work great. It records on SD cards.



Bye for now.

Ralph

2 comments:

Christian Hertl said...

I can't believe you found a helmet cam! We were just talking about one of those things.

Ralph's Ride Across America said...

It was pretty wild Christian, but in case I wasn't clear, the helmet cam found me!