30^th Birthday in Edgefield

Last year my wife Shannon and I decided to celebrate her birthday in a new fashion. We were drawn to a location that had caught our attention some years back.

My younger sister had gone on a road trip to Portland with three friends. Two of the three friends were making the trip to attend a concert and the other one and my sister were just going along for the ride. What attracted them was that the concert was taking place on a piece of property a short distance outside of downtown Portland. The property was yet another creation by the McMenamin brothers, who seem to be buying up every available piece of real estate that becomes available….especially those that have a haunted history.

The concert was taking place in Edgefield (http://www.mcmenamins.com/54-edgefield-home), about 30 minutes outside of downtown Portland. Edgefield was formerly a poor farm, a place where the state of Oregon housed and took care of their less fortunate citizens. It has now been transformed to what was explained to a friend of ours at the “adult Disneyland.”

What does “adult Disneyland” consist of you ask? Well first of all I would like you to try and imagine it for yourself. Picture it in your mind, feel the feels, smell the smells, and experience the experiences. What would sort of things could result in an adult pulling on the sleeves of their friends saying “we gotta go try that!!” What sort of place could cause adults to be too excited to sleep, their minds running a mile a minute in anticipation for the pure joy to follow?

Are you picturing a place that has its own vineyard and winery on sight? Are you picturing a place with a selection of unique bars where you can sample an impressive menu of beer that is brewed across the path from the winery? Are you picturing a distillery that seconds as the pro shop for the par 3 golf course that winds its way around the perimeter of the property?

Edgefield has all this and more, it has everything that you need to make for a memorable experience. I could go into the whole description at this point but I think that the best strategy would be for me to save that for later. Instead I will finish setting the tone for my birthday weekend.

Shannon and decided that Edgefield would be a great place to spend a weekend away while we celebrated her 28^th birthday. It was a good weekend to take such a trip because we were able to attend on the same weekend that they planned to celebrate Oktoberfest. The weather was awful but that did not stop us from having a time that we would not soon forget. The live music and seasonal beer were a great addition to the pure bliss of the Edgefield experience.

I will not go too much into the details, because once again the beginning part of this post is just to set the stage our most recent encounter with Edgefield. I will say, however, that our first trip down there was a memorable one. It is entertaining to think back on it now but at the time it was less amusing.

It should be mentioned that we ended up leaving on a Saturday and the Friday before was the actual day of Shannon’s birthday. This being the case, she felt that she had little other option than to go out and party. It is somewhat rare to have a birthday that you can celebrate to the fullest on the actual day, and celebrate she did.

One of the fun slash devastating things about including the drinking of alcohol in your birthday festivities is that all of your friends feel the need to buy you a drink as a gift. The thought is a good one, and at the time it is appreciated and encouraged, but this appreciation is not fully recognized the next morning. If you ask me, I would prefer a stack on birthday cards stuffed with cash, like used to be the norm throughout our high school days….mine at least, I was not big into underage drinking…and neither were my parents. I didn’t become cool time later on in my life lol.

Anyway this is exactly what happened to Shannon the next day. She had a really hard time getting up in the morning due to all the “gifts” that she consumed the night before. Our original idea was to leave early-ish in the morning, in order to get to Portland with enough time to enjoy the evening.

We had planned to spend the first night downtown before venturing out to Edgefield the next morning. We had plans to borrow my Mom’s convertible so we could ride down in style. We told her that we would be picking the car up around 9am….but didn’t actually get there until closer to 2pm. Kind of awkward when your Mom keeps calling you asking why you haven’t come to pick up the car and you have to come up with an answer that doesn’t involve throwing Shannon under the bus and telling the whole story. She just…..was really tired. She had a late night last night J.

That was just the beginning of the adventure. We didn’t even make it down to Portland until close to 11pm. It started out with nightmare traffic crossing the border, and then again outside Seattle, and then again outside of Tacoma. This was due to some awful weather that was also doing its best to delay us even further. At one point it was raining so hard that all traffic slowed down to half of the speed limit since they could not see more than 10 feet in front of their own vehicles. This would explain all the accidents that were responsible for the traffic delays we were experiencing. It was raining so hard that we got completely drenched on the 5 second excursion from the McDonalds lobby to our car parked right out front. Needless to say the roof of the convertible did not get a chance to do its thing on the journey down.

All things involved the trip down was not the best start for the high expectations that we had for our trip. But it did not take long for things to turn around. The time we did get to spend in downtown Portland did enough to entice us back and the epic time we had celebration Shann-Oktoberfest at the converted poor farm in Edgefield was enough for me to name it as the destination of choice for me upcoming 30^th Birthday celebration!!