It's 12:30am and I can't sleep. Too excited? Maybe. Feeling pressure to start this travel blog? For sure. Friends have encouraged me to write this thing and there's obviously an internal motivation (doesn't mean I don't love you guys, but it has to come from me....), but this is going to be a little more than a travel journal. There will be honesty, a real name or two, adult language, and debeuchery. This is not a journal for the faint-of-heart. You've been warned.
I took the long way out to my brother's cabin tonight. Realizing this would be the last time I'd see downtown Portland in a while, I took advantage of great music, a hot-rod Honda Civic, and that beautiful loop around Portland formed by I-5 and 405. The nostalgia was thick, the air ice-cold, windows down and smoking, I got a wonderful 360-view of the city, the river, the bridges. So many exits on that route and out Hwy 84 held history, patterns of driving formed by living all over the city, by visiting certain folks a lot, finding favorite restuarants, etc.
At dinner tonight at Acropolis (steak and tits!), my ex-husband and the benefactor for the evening, asked if I wanted to hear something funny. Considering my stress levels had reached a startling new peak at the end of a long haul of prepping for this trip, I sure did want to hear something funny. He pointed out that it was six years to the day that we had met. Which would mean that I've lived in Portland for six years and two months. A tidy-ish circle of time. This fact helped point out a certain journey coming to an end, my first chapter in Portland. Ah reflection!
Fortunately for me, that reflection provided a baseline, a then and now kind of comparison. Not too shabby right now. I'm also bringing along a journal I started on a similar trip almost exactly one year ago, at a very different time in my life. I hope to bring in those entries to this blog, compare the state of the union from last year to this.
My eyes are gluing themselves shut. If I close them, will they stay shut?