Portland - Day 3 - Rafting and Brûlée

Day 3 began at 9:30AM.  We awoke from our slumber to the option of seeing Portland in the daytime, given our previous night arrival in the dark.  Meagan, Jim and Beth had designs on floating the lazy river.  This is similar to something we have done before in the wilds of Idaho, a gentle current in the middle of nowhere and you float lazily along with only the sounds of nature lulling you into a contemplative nap-like state.  The river was very shallow and no life jackets were needed.  And with the promises of sandwiches (Portland cheese steak?--what the heck!), and a glass of white wine, it promised to be an afternoon of deep thought and zen-like contemplation.

The river was quite low, but wasn't exactly lazy.  I wouldn't say there was a need for a life jacket--that was true for me, at least--but given the river had an extra cup of coffee peed into it by the hoochie with the tramp stamp in the next raft, no not here, the other other one.  No the one in the blue.  The light blue.  Her she was totally peeing--I became concerned for some of the less acute swimmers on the river.

Did I mention that most of Portland and half of Seattle decided to join us on the not so lazy river?  The rapids were shallow, but swift, which made falling out of the raft annoying and painful, because the river was just deep enough for you to stand easily, but the current fast enough to prevent you from doing so, and instead just drag you flailing along the rocky bottom.  Beth experienced this first and it resulted in the loss of her sarong.

I was the second to fall on our journey when some irresponsible people on a large raft thought it was a good idea to follow me too closely into a rapid.  They basically ran me over which resulted in my knee getting painfully banged on the rocks as tried to get out from under their raft.  My knee will be fine once the bruises heal.  Unfortunately as punishment for their irresponsibility, I had to kill the boatload of people and chop them into pieces and eat them.  Many people on the river protested at the harshness of my punishment, but I was afraid I would have to insist.  They must be killed and eaten.  And so it was.

The third and final tragedy occurred when Meagan's hat was lost, just before we learned of a tragedy I will number as three-and-a-half, but will label as "holy shit!".  We apparently arrived five minutes after a young man broke his arm on a rope swing.  I don't know how one can do what he did by using a rope swing, but he apparently managed to achieve a compound fracture in his forearm.  In looking at the rope (a regular rope with some knots, where you swing over the water and let go and then land in the water) and imagining how one could achieve such a wound as a result, he may as well have been playing chess for all I understand.  How the hell do you break your arm on a rope swing?  Let alone "the worst injury I have ever seen" as stated by a stander-by who also was a football coach.  The world may never know.

Or at least I won't ever know, so I'm just going to reason it was witchcraft and that either he or the rope were hexed.

The day came to an end at the pull-out and my abs ached (and still do immensely) from what equated to a seven-hour sit-up, due to my floatie tube being just a little too small, or big or somehow both, for me.  (I have a feeling that by the end of the eat-cation, this workout and the resulting pain will have been entirely in vain.)

Jim and Meagan unloaded the equipment and we reconvened around 9 for an evening meal at a restaurant called Veritable Quandry.  And the menu was!  We all wanted everything and at least there were five of us to be able to order a little of everything.  But the thing I was most looking forward to was the Creme Brûlée. It was chocolate hazelnut Creme fucking Brûlée and it was A MA ZING.  We also ordered a Marscapone cheesecake and some kind of incredible banana split with peanut brittle ice cream, which was really good, but the Brûlée was my personal heaven.  I thought for a moment that I was going to start to cry it was so good.

Jim will be leaving on business in the morning and we won't see him again the remainder of the trip.  Meagan and Beth have a rendezvous with us tomorrow at the Tillamook Cheese Factory.  Can't wait for that!