The Great American Road Trip: Day 32

Apparently it's been raining and miserable for a week, but magically this time around instead of bringing the rain I brought the nice weather! It's a bit chilly in the mornings and evenings, but during the day the weather has been warming right up, sunny and cheerful - I'm feeling pretty lucky if I do say so myself.

Dave took the day off work so that we could spend time together and so that he could run a few "business hours" errands. We didn't have much of a time table, so we both gratefully slept in - I got up and out the door to jog around the neighborhood at the crack of 8am, conveniently missing all those motivated crazy folks that were probably doing the same thing 2 hours earlier before going to work. It was still pretty chilly, that nice fleece vest I got out of the free bin in Burkina has really come in handy!

After showers we hopped in the car and stopped at the cobbler and the tailor, then found our way to Tom's Pancake House for...well, at that point it was pretty much lunch. When you pull up and look at the sign and the exterior that seem like they haven't changed for several decades, but the lot is still full at 11am during the lull between breakfast and lunch - you know this is a pretty good bet for a decent meal. Not too surprisingly, ordering an omelet and pancakes resulted in the biggest omelet I've ever seen (those three eggs must have come from giant chickens), and three fluffy hot pancakes that were perfectly cooked. We did our best to clean our plates, but eventually had to admit defeat, pay our bill, and head towards the lightrail station to go into town.

I was really impressed by the public transit setup - besides a bizarre pay structure, the buses and trains seem frequent, clean, and to travel a fairly extensive part of the city and suburbs. The thing I couldn't figure out for the tickets was why buying a week, 14 day, or month pass cost the same amount as buying a daily pass 5 days a week - the only way buying anything else would save you money would be if you took transit every day. But the good thing is that your pass is good all day, on any form of transport - very handy! We stopped first at Next Adventure, an REI or EMS-type store with all kinds of camping/climbing/skiing/frisbee golf/etc gear, both new and used. Dave talked to some friends while I wandered like a kid in a candy store :)

We wandered around a bit, and hopped back on a train across the river to book-lover's heaven - Powell's. Taking up an entire block, with goodness knows how many floors chopped up by walls and half staircases into a myriad of themed and color coded rooms, it's truly a delight to wander. Dave made his selections fairly quickly, while I searched a bit before hitting the jackpot in the medical non/fiction section - I left with three, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I've been meaning to read it for ages, but then I heard a Radiolab podcast interviewing the author and talking about the demise of the case study in medicine, which sparked me to buy it when the opportunity arose. I'm tempted to go back on Monday to sit in the coffee shop, but I suspect it would be very hard for me to resist buying more books!