Portland and Me

My mom works for an airline, so I'm able to make reservations, and only pay for the flight if I actually get on it. My boyfriend has that same ability. A couple of years ago, he said something or someone said something that lead to us taking a trip to someplace where we didn't know where we were going.

Our anniversary is in August, so last year, we started planning a trip to someplace where we wouldn't know where we were going until we actually got to the airport. I did a ton of research to figure out where the airline flew to non-stop, somewhere not too far away, so we didn't spend our vacation on an airplane. After a lot of back and forth, we finally wound up with five options: Albuquerque, Boise, Las Vegas, Portland and Seattle. So I gave my mom those options and those dates and told her to only tell me when we should arrive at the airport that Saturday morning (Saturday's are a better time to fly than Fridays).

The night before we packed for every kind of a weather we could encounter. It was summer, so nothing was too drastically different, although Vegas was supposed to be very hot, of course. And we couldn't take anything but carry-on luggage, in case it wound up in once place and we wound up in another. But we were only going for three days, so we figured we could handle it.

So we got up very early on Saturday morning and drove to LAX. Once there, he went to go stand in the security line and I went to get our tickets. I waited for the machine to tell us where we were going.

Good news! Albuquerque! Bad news! Thunderstorms there had delayed our plane by about four hours. Our short amount of time would be wasted by waiting, and there was no guarantee that the thunderstorms would stop.

I felt bad because it meant waking my mom up at around six on a Saturday, but I called her to see if she could help. In the meantime, we went through security.

She booked us on a flight to Boise. It left in around an hour. While I myself had picked Boise, and I knew that there'd be plenty of hiking to be had, along with inexpensive motels,  I did feel a little disappointed.

I was still on the phone with my mom as we passed the first gate, and leaving out of it was a flight to Portland. I asked her to see if there was any room on it. She said yes, two seats left, but warned me that getting out of Portland, even early on a Tuesday, like we planned, wouldn't be easy. But we decided to be optimistic and get in line for Portland. And so began our Portland adventure.

Tomorrow: Part II