Travelin' Man

I got the "opportunity" to go to Portland this week for some meetings at el corpo. The meetings were rather uneventful but it did allow me to go to one of my favorite cities in the U.S.

If you haven't been to Portland, OR, think of what Boulder might be like if it had a metro downtown with high rises. It's a really liberal town with tons of culture. Portland has more breweries and restaurants per capita than anywhere else in the states. That makes getting a beer and food an adventure. I'll have to save this for another post.

What I really want to share is what I've been seeing in the Portland airport over the last couple months:

It's a really cool exhibit. I had been reading about the hand built bike scene in Portland for a while. Most notably in the handmade bicycle issue of Mountain Flyer Magazine. It's an intriguing art and if I had unlimited funds, I'd have an entire garage of different bikes! My favorite bike in the exhibit is the Renovo Hardwood Bicycle. Simply put, it's beautiful. I've never seen anything like it and I spent a lot of time just staring (drooling?) at it through the window. At $2300 it seems like a bargain for piece of art (If I had one, I probably wouldn't ride it... thus it becomes art). The other bikes in the exhibit are equally as impressive and show how cool the bike scene is in Portland.

Sometimes travel really sucks. But seeing like the handbuilt bike exhibit make up for it. It also helps to get on an earlier flight home too. It was a middle seat, but getting home earlier is always worth a little discomfort. At least I could put in my shure earbuds with the memory foam and let the airplane noise disappear:

The thunder clouds over Denver were impressive:

Headed off to Salida this weekend to ride the Monarch Crest Trail... More to come...