holisticgeek’s peace ride

It’s been a great trip. I wanted to run down the people I met in Portland because they’re so warm and wonderful. Everyone can talk to you on the street. First there was a person named Dolly. She sat down and talked to me at the bus stop out of the blue, one of the first days I was here. She was 62. She looked about 40 years old. She talked about retirement and how people just get comfortable and how wanted to go to New York and live with her sister. That time of life where she wanted to connect with her. So Dolly was a great person right up front.

Karen at Waterfront Bikes, she was great. She showed me the great trails and shared my sentiments dealing with the tour. She really worked out a good deal for me for the bike rental. A guy Michael from L.A. He made the decision to leave L.A. while he was here and move to Portland. We talked a little about, just a few spiritual things. Some of the quotes he said was “God is in nature and is protecting me so I’ll be just fine.” He wrote death certificates for funeral homes. I found that as an interesting occupation. He will be staying in Portland. I met him at the hostel. Doug and Laura at the hostel: Laura was moving from Sacramento to Portland, and Doug from Eugene was her tour guide. They were a great couple I met there.

I guy I met Tom, who I met casually while biking, he lived in Hawaii. He told me about how the 100 degree days almost did him in when he was surfing with his friends…people from South Korea who saw my Twins hat and loved baseball. Greg, who I met previously before coming to Portland, we shared pizza and a meal at Old Town Pizza, the home of Nina the ghost. We didn’t see her. Alex Wrekk from Microcosm [Publishing]. I want to thank her especially for all the great links and resources. I’m glad to have gone there and seen their store and seen all the things that they do. I wish I could have gone back again.

I met a bike messenger while I was there. He was a man of a few words. He seemed to like his job. He said “yeah, Portland’s really chill.” He has a lot of down time, been in a lot of jobs. Didn’t say much at all but was a cool guy. Food for Thought Cafe: they make the greatest sandwiches. I think that was a great highlight. And Daniel, this guy who I met at the library. This guy who read my blog. We got to connect and go to the Dances of Universal Peace at the church. It was great. I’m very thankful to Daniel. Sorry for not calling him back, I was doing my own thing the next day, trail riding.

As far as transit goes, I haven’t talked about transit in Portland much. Transit is great! They have a fareless square in downtown Portland. Basically that means that if you’re inside this interstate loop in downtown, you ride for free on the bus, the light rail, and the streetcar. Also, they have really cool parking kiosks and zones where you can take your time with you. All these kiosks are run by solar power, they have solar panels on the top. It’s kind of like you go and pay this little kiosk, they give you a little ticket thing that you can put on your window on your car and it says how much time you have. You can take that time with you. So if you still have time left on your sticker that you put on your window you can go to another place, another parking spot downtown or somewhere else and use that time up. It’s great. As long as it’s in the same or longer time zone. Some of them are 90 minutes, some are 4 hours, and some are 5 hours. You can’t take a 5 hour time sticker and then go park in a 90 minute time zone for 5 hours. They don’t like that.

The people in Portland are really great, they’re very laid back, they’re very friendly. You can talk to people on the train, you can talk to people on the streetcar. People take their pets and their cats and they introduce you to them on these forms of transit. It’s great. You know, in Minnesota we have this very thin veneer between people. I’ve not found that here. People are very open and honest, regardless of whether they’re very extroverted, introverted, a little weird, or if they have really good social skills. It’s very open. People are very laid back. I kind of like that.

After that, I actually took a nap. It was great. So today has been my relaxing day. Then I hung out with my friends Nancy and Martin who I didn’t get to see at DemiCon in Des Moines, which is normally a science fiction convention I go to this time of year. It was last weekend in Des Moines and I didn’t get to see them. That’s the time of year, once a year usually, that I get to see them. Nancy and I hung out for a while and she drove me up to a park where you can see Mt Hood and Mt St Helens at another point as well. Really good picturesque views of those two mountains. You can even see Mt Rainier and the whole Oregon coast range as well from this point in the city. It was wonderful. We went to a nice little tavern up in the hills called the Rock Creek Tavern for dinner. It was just a nice time seeing them.

Then I went to the library, hung out, and actually got online and read my email. It was nice to get back on the Internet again and catch up. When I left the library, I was greeted by this one guy who was like, “hey, you live in Minneapolis, don’t you?” I wondered who it was and it was Daniel, who had posted a comment to my blog. So, interesting twist of fate. Ran into somebody who was kind-of a reader and I’ve emailed back and forth before going on the Portland ride. So I told him my story and what I was planning on doing while there. He actually took me to this really cool thing called Dances of Universal Peace at an Episcopal Church in the Northwest area of Portland in the Hollywood district. It was a wonderful, wonderful, kind-of a moving experience and all totally all about what I’m going through. You sing and dance in circles. Songs about soul, songs about healing one’s life and healing one’s soul. Just a wonderful community where you dance, you embrace, and you hug and you sing really great songs. It was totally what I needed. Something totally out of the blue, serendipitous, that I never would have imagined myself going to. So, it was wonderful and I’m kind-of glad that we met up and I can go to something like this really spur-of-the-moment.

“Hello, this is a recap for Monday here in Portland, Oregon. I wanted to let people know what I did today. I actually got a good night’s sleep, which was really nice and went up to Microcosm Publishing today in the afternoon, after lunch. I spoke with one of the workers there, Alex Wrekk. I met her at Madison Zine Fest in October with my friends Randy and Michael, my partner. It was just great to talk to her again and I browsed through all the collection they have. They have a nice office and I took pictures of it. Microcosm Publishing is a zine distro and they specialize in independent publishing, do-it-yourself zines, off the beaten path publications that you wouldn’t find anywhere else. They’re at microcosmpublishing.com so check them out.

I picked up a great book on lots of DIY or do-it-yourself projects that anyone can do and also a DVD of Critical Mass in New York City from 2001. It’s called Still We Ride!, it’s a 37 minute documentary about the 2004 critical mass ride during the Republican National Convention in New York City. I haven’t seen it, I’ve heard it’s going to be great. Alex was a great reference to help me find some other bike-related things here. One of the things I plan on doing is a bike ride around Portland that’s informally gathered but structured in 8-10 mile bike rides that they run in Summer at night.

I also plan on going to the Food for Thought Cafe. Thank you Michael for translating and giving the right web sites for me on the translation. Food for Thought Cafe is at Portland State University and they aren’t open later at night. I wanted to go to dinner there, but I’ll have to go tomorrow between 7:30am and 3:00pm. I plan on going to Food for Thought for lunch. Again, they’re an organic, fair-trade, fair economic policies, collectively-run, cooperatively-managed cafe in Portland State University. Run by students, organized by students, benefiting students. It should be great.

I also got some information about the Portland Catholic Worker. I’m going to give them a call. See if they may need someone to bring good veggies, because I plan on going to the farmer’s market on Wednesday and maybe I’ll bring them some good veggies if I can find a bus route there. A nice way of giving back. Catholic Worker communities, if you’re not familiar, provide hospitality to homeless and they also do political action as far as nonviolence and peace, and a lot of social justice work they do along with that. So that’s what I plan on doing, possibly Wednesday, if I get good veggies from the local farmer’s market here.

So that’s in a nutshell what I did today. Planned everything. I went also to the Hawthorne district, which is a really interesting, funky neighborhood. I had great vegan cuisine at the Daily Grind Cafe which is attached to a really nice fresh foods market. The Hawthorne neighborhood is very trendy, very funky, but also just very grassroots. It was nice. It’s way up the hill, so I biked a lot. Biked up lots of hills and down lots of hills, so I think I put in a good 13-14 miles today. And the knee is doing just fine, which is nice, but I was a little bit tired so I came back to the Hostel. Doing some laundry and getting ready for bed. I have a full day tomorrow.

So, I had originally planned on biking with a group down the Oregon Coast, but that’s all changed. Time for plan B. I’m here in Portland, I’m going to make the best of it for the next few days. I’m going to come back on Friday… I leave on Friday and come back on Sunday. I changed my Amtrak ticket.

I have a lot of things that I can do. I’m probably going to go up to Microcosm Publishing. One of their owners, Joe Byle is an avid bicycle commuter. He actually moved his whole apartment using his bike on a cart. I want to talk to him and get a feel for some other bike sustainable stuff in Portland.

Tonight, I think I’m going to go to a movie. I’m going to see Who Killed the Electric Car. I’m going to take the bike that I have rented. I still have the bike rental, which is a good thing. I’m going to have that bike while I’m here, since I already paid for it. I’m going to get to everybody’s postcards tonight too and I’m going to take some great pictures and go see some really good scenic things around here: Japanese Gardens, Chinese Gardens and some other things happenings in the peace and justice community here. Hopefully, things will turn out very very well, and I’ll have a lot of good adventure with this after all. I didn’t really tell too many people when I was leaving. I didn’t want to make a big deal about it and I didn’t want to rain on anyone else’s parade because it was my choice.

But i did attend a great workshop today. We talked about “changing our relationship to power”. It was wonderful. A lot of good discussion from a guy named Marc who runs Kayak Tillamook on the Oregon coast, where he has actually hired logging professionals, old loggers to lead kayaking adventures to kind of inject sustainability into a community where it’s not necessarily accepted or where you wouldn’t necessarily see it. And talked about how he and three others started a Fresh Food Cafe [Food for Thought Cafe] at the university here in Portland. Where it was a student-run organization, they started this cafe, and it took away $1500 per day of business of Aramark, which was the corporate-run food service. It was a really big success. All the funds stay in the student community, they stay in this business, they stay at cafe. They choose local food, they decide on fair trade economics, they pretty much control their own destiny. They have student workers and they control the price and wages of student workers. Some really good things about how, by shifting the power dynamics and changing your relationship to power structures, you can actually affect change. More than protest and more than demonstrations, but actually going out and doing something, which is wonderful. Hopefully I can learn more about that. I think it’s ffcafe… I’ll find out the link for you later. But Fresh Food Cafe in Portland, Oregon at Portland State University. If you google that you can find all the information about Mark and how they started it.

But I’m in Portland now. I checked into the hostel and I finally got a shower. [After] 36 hours in a train, you need a shower. So, I got a shower, had some lunch and now I’m walking around Portland, which is wonderful. Transit is free in the downtown district. I’m going to go to Powell’s books which is one of the largest independent bookstores, probably the largest in the nation. Where they have a whole city block, a square block, of books.

Everything’s going well. It’s a nice 67 degrees here in Portland today, which is probably a far cry from what Minnesotans are feeling right now.

It’s been a busy day of packing, and I’m amazed that I got everything that I needed into my little carry on bag with the little straps on it so I can strap on my… my hydration pack too. So… it was kinda tough. So hopefully we’ll all get there in one piece. And I have another bag that has my sleeping bag, and a sleeping mat, and a little jacket in there too. So, that will go on the support and gear van that they do.

So I’m going to be posting some voice posts on the LiveJournal account that I have. And Michael will be putting them on the Peace Ride blog. So hopefully you’re on one of those two blogs so you can read it or listen to it. There might be a transcription on LiveJournal if he gets around to it, but…no pressure.

So, almost ready to go to Portland and I’ll be posting some voice posts along the way. So stay tuned… and I don’t have internet access really while I’m there. Just with my cell phone, and I can’t leave my laptop, so that’s why I’m doing it this way.