Despite the health care ordeal, we did manage to have a great time in Portland. The first day there, Nate and I headed out to the Tillamook State Forest for some Jeeping. I’ve never done any real 4-wheeling, and Nate happens to have two Jeeps built up just for that. We only took one of them, because, as any car nut knows, not all of your project cars can be running at any one time. That and I didn’t want to go run into a tree with somebody else’s car. My biggest impression (and the thing I kept repeating to Nate) was “you mean you can actually drive over that!?” To which Nate usually replied by hitting the gas and doing just that. There were a few hairy sections that we opted out of, but Nate assured me that they could be done. I personally felt that I would be more comfortable on them with a harness and belay, rather than in a truck. But that’s just me I guess. I even got to drive a few sections, and it was actually a lot of fun. Which is bad, because now there is another toy added to my list for when I have a job again.
The next day, we swapped the Jeep for some bikes and headed out to Post Canyon in Hood River. Nate had been telling me about some great freeriding terrain and stunts out there that we had to go ride. It was so fun I made a whole separate page for it, which is here.
Saturday, Jennifer had the day off. She, like Ritu, is an unpaid slave… uh, I mean med student. The weather was beautiful, so we headed over to Forest Park, which is one of the biggest city parks in the U.S. We put on some spandex and wiped the cobwebs off our cross country bikes for a good ride that actually involved pedaling uphill. Who knew that could actually be fun? Especially the spandex part! After a good ride, we packed up the Honda (hmmm, take the Van or the Honda? 12 mpg vs. 40 mpg?) and headed out to some hotsprings near Mt. Hood. After a short hike in, there are a bunch of hollowed out logs and wooden tubs that are filled by a natural hotsprings. The hotsprings are great; the naked people, not so much.
Bright and early Monday morning, Nate went under the knife. Jennifer had to work, so I sat at the hospital and gave periodic updates. After the surgeon opened up Nate’s finger, they found that he had shattered his knuckle into four pieces, which she pinned back together. Her comment was something like “you must have really hit that hard to break a healthy finger like that.” As a witness to the crash, I’d say she was right.
After a few days of rest and a follow up appointment, as Willie says, we were “On the road again.”