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!!

Day 5- Back to Reality

This post is not as exciting as maybe the last few but you cannot live your life on vacation...or at least I haven’t found a way to yet, but believe me I am fast at work trying to find a one J. 

So day 5 started very early, I am talking at 4:30 am. We really did do ourselves (and our camping neighbors) a favor by doing the majority of the packing the night before. But we left a few things for the morning. We figured that it was worth it to pack our tent and our bed in the morning. Sleeping on the ground without a tent would be an interesting idea, but interesting ideas are not always GOOD ideas. I did mention before that adventure was the main purpose of this trip and packing up a tent and rolling up sleeping bags in the dark was an adventure J. We were louder (carrying a bag of empties to the recycling is not quiet) and brighter (had to use our lantern for some things) than we planned on being but one key factor that is not to be overlooked, since it was so dark and since we were gone when everyone else got up.....they cannot be sure who it was...genius!

We were all packed up and ready to go when 5 am rolled around. We were 80% sure we had everything and 20% didn’t particularly care if we did or not. We were still half asleep and trying to be as considerate as possible. Then we were off! I was in a strange sort of haze where I was obviously awake and coherent but still felt like I was in a dream like state, but don’t worry I was fine to drive J. It do not take long for Shannon to slip off into dream land and I did not interfere, she had done her job helping with the packing and we do not have the type of car that allows two people to drive at once so I had no reason to stop her. There is a strange calm when it comes to driving, running or really doing anything, at a time when you are, for all intents and purposes, alone in the world. I know it will not be a popular recommendation, but I will still recommend trying it sometime. It gives you a whole new perspective which can be especially refreshing for anyone living in big cities where you constantly have to share your environment with a large volume of people. It is not something I plan to make a habit of, but I appreciated it in the moment.

We decided to drive up the coast on the way home. It would take a bit longer than other available routes, but we budgeted for the time and were excited to take the scenic way home. After a few directional issues were ironed out with the GPS we had our route programmed in and we were ready to go. The early part of the drive was virtually uneventful. The sun was rising from the east and the water was to the west, plus on top of everything it was heavily overcast....and don’t forget still very dark out. It was a few hours and many miles before there was much of anything to see. Things started to pick up a bit after we stopped for a healthy sausage and egg mcmuffin as we were pushing through the veil of darkness. After that we took in some small fishing towns speckled along the river side when the road took us inland and some quaint beach towns located along the coast. Many picture opportunities missed by our camera but well established memories in our minds. It was a good thing that the roads were clear because I spent more time gazing at the coastline looking for an excuse to wetsuit up and catch a few waves, than I was on the road ahead. The waves were visually stimulating but not to the point where it warranted unpacking half the car to get my gear and repacking around a wet board and a soaked wetsuit. I did, however, start a list of places I want to visit my next time down the coast, and that was good enough in my books. Knowing that the water would be colder than a witches’ tit also helped keep me out of the water. I continued to drive until we hit the renowned Cannon Beach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_Beach,_Oregon). I did this for a chance to get out of the car to stretch and wake myself up, but I was not disappointed. It was beautiful! I imagine it would be beautiful anytime, in any weather, but the early morning fog gave it a ghostly, haunted feel, not creepy, more mysteriously engaging. We snapped some amazing landscape photos, traded positions in the car and were back on the road with my lovely wife behind the wheel.

It did not take long for me to check out of reality and into the Sandman Hotel (get it *nudge *nudge??). Our touristy stop at Cannon Beach was as much for the sightseeing as it was to avoid falling asleep behind the wheel. So, needless to say, I have very little to say about the next part of the trip. I awoke once while on a bridge with no land in sight, freaky but fun, and then regained consciousness close to Westport, WA our usual surfing destination. This brought back some good memories for us, but none that are really interesting enough to share in this post.

There were only a few other things worth mentioning on the ride back. One is the Quizno’s miracle, and two was the awesome time we made on the way back. The Quizno’s miracle was when Shannon told me that she really wanted to eat a Quizno’s sub for lunch and she wanted to eat between 10 and 10:15. Fast forward now to when the car clock moved from 9:59 to 10 and the roadside sign we passed immediately after was for a Quizno’s at the next exit....BOOM, mind blown! Second, I ordered an arrival time of 2pm and we arrived home at 2:15...not bad at all. Plenty of time to get to my ball game and on time....and we won the game too! Brilliant!

So that was our trip to Portland, and the Oregon Coast! I hope you enjoyed the tales of our travels! The next question is; what do we have to look forward to next? Well seeing as this took me sometime to get through (I do have a day job after all) I should have two more trips to write about, our random trip to Penticton and our Labor Day Classic Camping/Surfing trip in Westport. Stay tuned, I promise I will make it worth your while J.