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Other stuff we did in Portland:

  • Drove out to the Expo Center to go to a mega garage sale. They had lots of interesting old stuff, like old toys and dishes and furniture, but we didn’t buy anything. All the dust made my allergies go nutso.
  • Went to a sweet farmers market in the university area. SO MANY SAMPLES!! SO MUCH CHEESE!! It was a great farmers market, I wish we could have brought some produce home. We did get some nice sharp cheddar and a delicious cured meat stick thingy.
  • Went out for ice cream at Salt & Straw AGAIN.
  • Drank a lot of types of craft beers.
  • Got drenched by rain.
  • Ate a lot of doughnuts.
  • Waited in line at Screen Door for brunch. IT WAS WORTH IT.
  • Shopped at Trader Joe’s.
  • Strolled up and down Mississippi Street window shopping. We both got little keychain thingies and Scott got a Portland bridge t-shirt.
  • Drove Eastwards to see that waterfall, which we looked at for about 5 minutes, and then left, haha. By the way why was the entire tourist population of the world all at the waterfall?? I mean, it was tall, but not that special? IDGI.

Then Sunday afternoon we drove back to Vancouver.

Very good trip, mostly because of the food and drink!! Huge mega post of that coming up ASAP!

 

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Scott and I went to Portland for Easter this year. We left early on Good Friday hoping to beat the lines at the border but we still had to wait a pretty long time. Cannot wait until Scott gets to have a Canadian passport and we can skip the whole going inside part of crossing the border.

Anyway once we crossed into Washington we headed for the first Taco Bell so I could try the new Taco Bell breakfast. Because I am gross.

steak a.m. crunchwrap

taco bell breakfast burrito

cinnabon delights

I went a little crazy and ordered a Steak A.M. Crunchwrap, a Bacon Breakfast Burrito, and a small pack of Cinnabon Delights. The Crunchwrap was actually really good. It actually had great flavour and surprisingly wasn’t greasy! I would prefer to eat a Crunchwrap now than a McDonalds breakfast sandwich if I had to have fast food breakfast. The burrito was meh and the Cinnabon Delights were good but I don’t feel the need to ever have them again. Scott had a Bacon A.M. Crunchwrap and enjoyed it, but mine was better if you like the regular Taco Bell kinds of flavours.

Taco Bell Menu, Reviews, Photos, Location and Info - Zomato

from 4t-trail.org/

The Taco Bell feast filled us up for the rest of the drive to Portland. After dumping our bags at the hotel we walked over to the base of the Portland Aerial Tram to start the 4T trail. I had found out about this hike before our trip and thought that it sounded like a fun way to see a bit of the city. The premise is that you take a tram, trail, train and trolley in this big loop around Portland.

portland

The tram part was cool, we could see lots of the city. It was a very quick trip, maybe 5 minutes tops.

The next part was the trail. The first bit of the hike was fun, we were chatting, joking around and enjoying nature. It was only once we reached the first signpost that I realized that this was actually going to be a long uphill climb thing and I hate going up hills!!! It was 4.1 miles, with 900 feet of elevation change. Barf.

I thought the hike was going to take like 30 minutes, but it was more like 3.5 hours. I suppose the views from the top were nice but my heart was beating 180 bpm so I wasn’t feeling great.

Anyway we eventually made it to where the trail meets the train, near the zoo. We hopped on to the train and went back to the downtown core. After all that exercise we decided we should head towards the Pearl District for dinner and ice cream.

I think I’ll save the descriptions of our food for another post. But anyway after dinner we took the trolley back to our hotel to complete the 4T Trail. I slept pretty well that night!!

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We are off to Portland tomorrow for a mini long weekend holiday. I’m looking forward to all the doughnuts, brunch, ice cream, cocktails, beer and other delicious food we will get to eat. Portland seems to have a lot of great foodie options! Scott printed out a map for me and I’ve been marking all the different recommended places on it for maximum tasty eats, no matter which area we end up in.

I also plan on stopping for Taco Bell breakfast on the way there. Hehehehe.

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When I was in Calgary I stayed part of the time at my teammates’ girlfriends’ parents’ place (holy apostrophe) and part of the time with my friend Ally and her hb (from my university days in Halifax!). Couch surfing like that saved me a ton of money and also it was fun. It’s always enjoyable catching up with awesome people that you haven’t seen in a while.

Ally took me to her barn and I got to ride her horse! Actually that is not her horse in the picture above though, that is her friends’ horse. We swapped for a bit because I couldn’t get Ruffino to go anywhere that I wanted him to, haha. I had a lot of fun riding around. I think the last time I had been on a horse was in Girl Guides.

Lesley came to Calgary for a few of the days that I was there too. Ally took all of us to Peter’s Drive In where we all got cheeseburgers and milkshakes and an ENORMOUS bag of fries. It was very tasty, and very reasonably priced.

The extreme Olympic watching carried over from Ottawa to Calgary. Ally even had a 5AM hockey party at her house. I slept through the first ten minutes but smelled bacon cooking so I got up to watch too. Having a morning party is pretty cool because breakfast makes great party food.

I went out with Matt’s friends one night in the city. We went to The Unicorn for dinner and a couple drinks. I had perogies and kielbasa that was pretty decent. I was super nervous about riding the train around downtown with no tickets but 2 days later I found out that it is free, hahahaha.

Then it was finally time to catch the bus back to Vancouver. It was 16 hours but it was cheap ($49 including taxes). I’ve never been through that part of Canada so I picked a bus that left in the daytime. The weather was perfect and it was a very beautiful drive. My butt did start to hurt a lot by the time I got back to Kamloops though.

Canmore seemed really pretty. Is Canmore the Squamish of Alberta?

Also I have never seen so much snow as I did around Revelstoke!!! I’m from Ontario but still, oh my word there was so much snow. A meter tall column of snow perched on top of a tiny phone pole??! HAHA! More on the ground. Avalanche piles everywhere. Snowbanks as tall as the bus! Those snow shed tunnel thingies were interesting too. SO MUCH SNOW!!!

I think this was Shuswap Lake. It looked COLD.

The only really bad part of the bus ride was the dinner stop in Kamloops. By that point I was super sick of all my bus snacks that I brought and just wanted something with some vegetables in it for dinner. I didn’t have high expectations, even a McDonalds salad would have done the trick. From the bus stop I could see a ton of decent fast food options, but they were JUST far enough that you wouldn’t have time to walk there and get food and walk back in time. Especially because I wasted a few precious minutes using the washroom. Blergh. Torture. The bus stop restaurant actually had zero vegetable items. Unless you count green jello, cuz they had that.

But yeah that was the only bad part. I think I would take the bus again, if it was still so cheap and I still had a whole day to waste. Buses have internet and plugs on them now so it’s not even that boring.

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Last last week I was lucky enough to be able to take part of Can-Am week at the COP in Calgary. It was a week intended to give extra coaching and training to new sliders. That being said, Matt and I were definitely the most new out of everyone. Most of the other people had been sliding for a couple years and already had experience on a bunch of different tracks, or at least had a lot of experience on the Calgary track. There were a few guys from USA, a few from Ontario, a whole bunch of people from Alberta, and the four of us from BC.

The Calgary track is not near as fast as Whistler. But it does have its own challenges. The main one for us was that it is REALLY REALLY BUMPY. Also really really dirty. Because it is so close to the city a lot of dirt blows in. Also the track workers just aren’t as awesome as at Whistler. We are so spoiled at Whistler. There was bird poo frozen onto the track, and also sawdust? Yuck.

ANYWAY because it wasn’t so fast we were able to start from the top on our second run! This meant doing my first ever running start!! (My skeleton/life goal for this season!) The first few runs I did two-handed “running” starts (really I was pretty much walking). Fun! Later we had a couple sessions in the icehouse (an indoor push track practice thingy) where Ivo helped us work on our real one-handed running starts. It did help a lot but I will admit I still pushed somewhat tentatively on the real track because I was terrified of popping the groove and also crashing. PS you can see a video of me doing a running start on my Facebook wall.

The best part of the week was that there were always at least 3 coaches watching our runs. One coach even took videos. Then after each run they would come give us feedback on how we did and how we can improve. Very cool and very helpful. A lot of the pictures in this post are stills from the videos.

Like I said, the track is not super hard. There are only two parts that I had to worry about. 1) corner 8, which has the potential to flip you over if you go into it too late. I came close to flipping but managed to stay right-side-up the entire week. And 2) the kreisel (a 270 degree corner 3 pressure corner), which I also survived fine. Maybe just because I did “safety steers” though, which helped me but also slowed me down a lot. The fastest speed I got was only 107.9 km/hr!! (The good dudes were getting around 114 km/hr). One time I was NINE SECONDS slower than Mitch. NINE SECONDS!! Was I even on the same track?? I swear there was a short-cut I didn’t know about, haha.

On the last day of the week we had a fun race. I expected I was going to come in last place, and I did, but they were some of my best runs of the whole week so I still felt pretty good. They were my quickest and cleanest runs with my best push times. That’s success for me. Also it was really awesome that Lesley was able to come watch, it made me feel supported.

COLD KATRINA.

All in all it was a successful week. I learned SO MUCH. LIKE, SO MUCH. Everything makes a lot more sense now. It was tiring and challenging at times, but also super fun. While it was extremely embarrassing being so bad/new sometimes, the coaches and other sliders were always really encouraging and friendly. I loved meeting other sliders and making new friends. I’m so glad I was given the opportunity to take part in the training week.