Day 16: The Aeroplane, the City of Books, and the Water Beastie
There was condensation on our picnic table when we awoke. Me and Laurie refashioned it into a Water Beastie.
I left my new friends to see the Spruce Goose, the largest plane ever built. Howard Hughes, one of the country's premier crazy rich people, started building it for the military and didn't stop, not even after everyone working for him realized it was an extremely stupid idea. I wonder what Sigmund Freud thought of this undertaking... I mean an airplane is about as phallic as you can get, and the Goose project itself is clearly born of the "bigger is better" mentality.
They wanted to charge me fifteen units worth of money to go inside. This didn't sound bad until they revealed that admission would not allow me to fly it. Not only that, it seems the plane itself no longer has working parts - in fact, the damn hangar door doesn't even open. Really dissapointing - I expected much more from a government-funded museum.
From there off to the city of PORTLAND, one of the great surprises on my journey. When the first place you visit in the town is a bookstore which takes up an entire city block (six buildings, connected to form a true Frankenstein's monster of a building), then you know you're in a cool town
One more new friend. Briana, a strange and compelling young woman working at the Powell's Books cafe. After simply mentioning I was from out of town she kindly drew me an elaborate map of the city and gave me several days worth of sights to see. Briana is also a San Diego native, but Portland is clearly her favorite town and it's not hard to see why. It's a very compact and easy-to-navigate town, it's packed with culture and surrounded by lovely forests, plus it has the added gimmick of being built on a river and connecting its two sides with some extremely lovely bridges. One day in this city (the amount of time I was allocating it) would not do it justice.
I left my new friends to see the Spruce Goose, the largest plane ever built. Howard Hughes, one of the country's premier crazy rich people, started building it for the military and didn't stop, not even after everyone working for him realized it was an extremely stupid idea. I wonder what Sigmund Freud thought of this undertaking... I mean an airplane is about as phallic as you can get, and the Goose project itself is clearly born of the "bigger is better" mentality.
They wanted to charge me fifteen units worth of money to go inside. This didn't sound bad until they revealed that admission would not allow me to fly it. Not only that, it seems the plane itself no longer has working parts - in fact, the damn hangar door doesn't even open. Really dissapointing - I expected much more from a government-funded museum.
From there off to the city of PORTLAND, one of the great surprises on my journey. When the first place you visit in the town is a bookstore which takes up an entire city block (six buildings, connected to form a true Frankenstein's monster of a building), then you know you're in a cool town
One more new friend. Briana, a strange and compelling young woman working at the Powell's Books cafe. After simply mentioning I was from out of town she kindly drew me an elaborate map of the city and gave me several days worth of sights to see. Briana is also a San Diego native, but Portland is clearly her favorite town and it's not hard to see why. It's a very compact and easy-to-navigate town, it's packed with culture and surrounded by lovely forests, plus it has the added gimmick of being built on a river and connecting its two sides with some extremely lovely bridges. One day in this city (the amount of time I was allocating it) would not do it justice.
posted by BG | 1:16 PM
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