Garth and I drove down to Portland today – decided to skip Spokane and that part of the trip as the weather was really windy and rainy and unfortunately my friend Tanner isn’t feeling well so we decided to start heading south to the sunshine. We haven’t found it yet. The border crossing went well – they did have some funny questions as to why we were going on a road trip around the states without doing a similar one around Canada first (I had to say I was doing it after). The whole “get duty free booze to skip the line” trick was pretty rad too. Had to stop at a Taco Bell for lunch to start the Taco count (how many tacos we’ve eaten on the trip).

Arrived in Portland at rush hour – man there are a lot of bridges here! Makes Vancouver look tame. Checked into the Residence Inn (part of the Mariott) that Garth used his priceline magic to get ($45!) and laughed that parking was an additional $21. Went for dinner at the “Original Taco House” it was pretty good but we definitely had too many chips and salsa before dinner so we were really full when we went shopping at Walmart, Target (awesome!) and Bestcuy. Played with an iPad and Garth picked up an eye-fi card so we can upload pictures automatically when near the truck. (see the technology update below)

Day 1 stats:

530Km
6 tacos eaten
32 gallons of gas bought

Technology update:

As we are nerds, we have nerded up this trip appropriately. We bought a prepaid Virgin Wireless USB stick and Garth hooked it up by magic hackery to a wifi router that plugs into the trucks power plug. So *voila* mobile Wifi hotspot! We’ve also got a SPOT GPS satellite tracker sending our coordinates every 10 minutes and uploading to this website so you all can see where we are. I’ll update this once Garth has the eye-fi card uploading pictures automatically.