To spend any amount of time greater than this paragraph telling you about my 7 hour drive from Bend to Sacramento would be a waste of our time. There’s a town/county in California called “Yolo,” whose bus line is “YoloBus.” That’s topical. North of Yolo is Weed, which, whatever. I also saw a sign advertising “Dirt For Sale.” Moving on…

I’m coming off a week in Bend, Oregon. There’s probably a good chance that, if you’re not a beer snob or a traveler, you’ve never heard of Bend. It’s in Central Oregon. Not quite “dead center,” but close enough. There are 80,000 people in Bend. So it’s not small, but it’s also not Houston.

I wrote, ever so briefly, about Bend in my previous blog post. I had been there for a few hours and in my typical fashion, I judged it. I called it “Portland overflow” despite having, at the time, never been TO Portland. But that’s what I do.

I can report that after spending a week in Bend, it is a much better place than wherever you are right now. Or where I am. I’m in Sacramento.

During my time in Bend, I ate great food, drank seriously great beer, and breathed seriously clean air. One of the really great advantages of lots of trees is that the air is remarkably fresher. I got kind of lucky in that every day was perfectly clear with a high temp between 60 and 70.  With that luck came some time outdoors “recreating,” to steal a term from my uncle. I hiked. I rode a bicycle. I went for walks along rivers and through meadows. And I ate a lot of great food and drank some great beer and probably evened out the health risks/advantages of it all.

Cut to the chase, Bend is great. But maybe I realized unemployment is really what is great. People don’t necessarily work much in Bend. I’m sure there are career-types there. But I interacted with a lot of people who are just doing what they need to do to make enough money to enjoy their life. This is a vastly different mindset than that which I’m used to in D.C. where people work a lot, make very little money, and don’t really have hobbies. Or at least don’t talk about them socially, because you’ve just got to talk shop when out on a Saturday night.

(I deleted a large chunk of “big picture” life lessons that I had written in this space. I’ll save the “big picture” life lessons for when this trip is over. That could come within the next 7 days. I’m tired of being on the road. I want to get home to D.C. and to Amanda, most especially, and continue to enjoy my unemployment. That said…)

I’ll head to Los Angeles tomorrow morning where I’ll spend two nights in Silver Lake.

Notes:

-No new license plates. Lots of British Columbia, though. Snowbirds, I’d guess.

-I had another solo dinner in a nice restaurant tonight, though thankfully, the bar was mostly empty. The only patrons at the bar were a wonderful couple in their mid-50s from Kentucky, by way of New Hampshire. They started a conversation about Kentucky politics with the bartender, who didn’t seem too interested. I, however, was very interested in said conversation. They were great to talk to and gave me some hope for ALG14.

-No, seriously. Weed, California. Complete with “I
-The walls in the Holiday Inn Express Downtown are thinner than mid-90s Kate Moss. So after sleeping in a blissfully quiet, dark room for the last week, tonight should be great. Especially if this guy continues talking to what I would presume to be a deaf old woman.

-I don’t think I could ever get used to the time change relative to sports. I mean, I had never seen the Sunday Night Football wrap-up. Not only did I just see it, but it’s only 9:30. Included in that: I typed this while watching a football game, so forgive me if “you’re” became “your” inadvertently.