Robot Journal : Boise vs Omaha vs Portland

5/23/2013

Boise vs Omaha vs Portland
This has been a tough first half of the year. Lots of travel.
Apart from Hawaii, the last three weeks have been Omaha, Portland, and now Montana and Wyoming.
I'm in Boise right now (AKA "The City of Trees") sitting at the airport awaiting my ride.

When I first started this new job, one of my first major trips was out here. We did Utah, Montana, and Idaho in a week. It was brutal. You may recall this story, but it started out pretty badly as I got to the gate for my plane and realized that I had left my computer at the security checkpoint. There was running and sweating involved and it was a pretty miserable first day.
Now, I'm here again and this morning I had all sorts of anxiety. Making sure I wasn't leaving my computer. Or phone. Or wallet. Or luggage. I'm still a little post-anxious buzzy.

Omaha

This is what I knew about Nebraska and specifically Omaha: Nebraska lost to Clemson University in NCAA football in 1981. My friend George spent the night and we watched the game and afterward we went out in the front yard and cheered (as we were Clemson fans) and my dad was like, "get back in here young man".
Omaha was nice. Lovely people. I saw Warren Buffet's house and had many nice meals. On the flight to Omaha I looked it up on Wikipedia and I remember the following facts:
- The Enola Gay was built there
- The "Top 40" format was created there
- TV dinners were created there
- The bobby pin was invented there
- Those instant cake things that you can buy (with the paper knife) were created there.

Stumptown + Morning + REM's Murmur = Lovely

Portland
I'd been to Portland before and had also watched two seasons of Portlandia, so I’m basically an expert.

What a nice town that is. We had dinner at Pok Pok, the crazy popular Thai street food joint. Do you like fermented things? Fish sauce? I realize people do. I'm not a big fan, so I found a few too many of the dishes to be "challenging". Sorry. Apparently I'm an idiot. But there was one dish I really liked. Duck was involved. There were also wings.
I did get to see lots of nice neighborhoods and areas I hadn't seen before. Drinking my morning coffee at Stumptown while they played REM's Murmur was nice. Oh, and flying into Portland is awesome. What views you have of those mountains.

Idaho
That's where I'm now (contrary to my "Montana!" facebook update when I forgot which Mountain state I was in). When I started this entry I was at the airport. Now, it's basically 24 hours later. We're in Ketchum, Idaho.

Today we drove from Boise to Ketchum which was about two hours? I forget. I drove because my esteemed colleague traveling with me had a conference call, so he did that while I drove. Huge expanses. Mountains. Antelopes. Scenery.
Then I look at the speedometer and I'm going 95mph*.

* If you're the Idaho Highway Patrol, when I say "95mph" I of course mean "within the normal speed limits of your very nice highways"

We had a nice wine tasting in Ketchum. It's a really pretty little town. It's basically a ski town and is home to the first ski resort in the USA (a fact I haven't confirmed but the locals seem pretty confident about that). Tonight we had dinner with a bunch of people. I had a buffalo burger (tasty) and played this odd shuffleboard thing that had sand on the table and you slid things.

Remind me to tell you the story about the guy who was mayor here. Who sat across from me at dinner.

Idaho: then I looked at the sunset from my porch

The sun set. I'm in a strangely good mood.

How's it where you are?

(my brother made this little song. he lives in a town called Cumming.)

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