Road Trip – Omaha to Seattle – Day 15 – Portland, OR – September 25, 2010

College football and check out some of the city day. We heard about a farmer's/art market going on downtown, so we got on MAX and went to see what was up. Just walked around for blocks and looked at all the shops, homeless people, and other weird sights to see. Don't remember if I mentioned it but Portland, probably the weirdest style place I've been. It seems as if 50% of the population wakes up and says, “what is the weirdest thing I own to wear?” and wears it. It's fun, though. The market was really cool, there was a band, the thing was like 4 city blocks long, down by the river and had all types of goods, food, art, and more. I had a burrito for lunch and drank a free Dr. Pepper from the park, and we walked a mile or so to find a sports bar to watch some football.
Went through a few more park areas and another area that looked exactly like Omaha's Old Market area, before we reached the On Deck Sports Bar and Grill. It was an upscale sports bar, with many TVs. There was a large group of FSU fans who evidently go every week to this bar and made it fun. I felt bad just ordering water and sitting there watching TV for free so I ordered a beer and choked it down. The FSU fans got us thinking of how networked the Husker nation is, and if there was a Husker bar in town. The game was pay-per-view, even in Nebraska, so we didn't even think we were going to be able to watch the game, but with a little internet search we found a bar that was going to have the game.
Tom and I both set our GPSs to the address we found and headed towards the Refectory. It was evident after a few miles that our two units had very different ideas about where we were going, so I asked him if he knew what he was doing. He said yes, so I allowed it. We ended up 15 miles away from where we needed to be in Vancouver, WA. At least we made it into one Vancouver on the trip! After that we listened to my GPS and drove up to the Refectory. Didn't really know what to expect, but we walk in, and it look likes a fairly nice steak house or something. Come around the corner, and there was, I shit you not, probably 300 Husker fans all in red, with all the TVs in the place on the game! Pretty darn cool. It was probably cooler than a lot of bars in town on game day. I noticed the special was a Runza, and there were $2 Bud Light drafts, and I got to work. The “runzas” weren't really that close. They were about half the size of a real one, and they had potatoes in them and no cabbage. It tasted more like a La Casa potato pizza than a runza, but props for trying. There are no Runza restaurants in Oregon, they just made them here b/c that's what they serve at Memorial stadium. The game was pretty bad. We should have blown SDSU out, but it was closer than anyone thought. We won, but looking forward, it doesn't bode well. This place was so Husker that the girl drawing the raffle tickets' name was Lincoln. The BL drafts went down like water. I got a pretty good buzz pretty quick, and when we went outside and it was still light, I knew I was in trouble for the night.
It was Tom's last night of vacation, so he wanted to hit the town. He forced me at gunpoint into another strip club, I had some nice conversations with some nice young women, really, the bartender was from La Vista, and was into Graphic Design, too. Got outta there, and went to a couple other bars she suggested. One looked like a biker bar, but was just a regular weirdo bar and the other was a pool hall called Rialto. Neither was very impressive, and I felt pretty intoxicated, so I went back to the room while Tom scampered off to another club. No idea what time he got in, but his flight was at like 6am and I'm assuming he made it at this point. He took the MAX, and let me sleep in a little.