Vacation 2005 - Saturday, Sept 3

We are in the Portland airport, waiting for our flight to board as I write this note. Today was our last day of vacation on the left coast, although we have 2 more days before we have to return to work on Tuesday. We are looking forward to having these two days off to recover from the jet lag and this red-eye flight to JFK.

Today we spent time with Steve and Rachel doing some shopping and running some errands in the morning, and then we went to a downtown park to take some pictures before dinner (grilled chicken with an excellent mango salsa - salsa by Rachel).
We made great time to the Portland airport, we got the rental turned in with no problems (even my one free weekend coupon worked so that saved us about $80), we were the only people checking in at JetBlue and we got through security very quickly. We were at the gate 1.5 hours prior to boarding, which is about how close I like to cut it, but was way too early for Cheryl's tastes.

At the gate I decided to boot up and see if I could get this blog entry written off-line, figuring that I'd upload it sometime tomorrow when we are back home. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to discover that the Portland has free wireless! So we discovered as soon as I booted up that the Chief Justice had passed away. After reading the NY Times web site for a little while, I decided to go ahead and get this entry done.

I do have one complaint about Oregon (yes, only one!) and that is the drivers. I have driven in at least half of the 50 states, and Oregon is the only place where all the drivers seem to habitually drive 5-15 miles below the speed limit. Everywhere else I have driven, people who drive a little bit faster (like me) tend to do about 5 mph over the speed limit. If the highway is posted at 65, I tend to do about 70. In Oregon, however, they all seem to do 50-60. Everyone. Across all lanes. This behavior extends to downtown as well. Most of downtown Salem seems to be 30, but I rarely could even get to 30 as most drivers were doing 20. I don't know if speeding tickets are incredibly expensive out here, or if it is just the laid back left coast attitudes, or what...but it was damn frustrating.

Anyway, we are looking forward to getting back home, sleeping in our own bed, and seeing our cats again. Hopefully we can sleep most of the flight back. We have earplugs to help with that goal.