Summertime! And the Living is Queasy!

A picture of the world's tiniest park, found in downtown Portland.  Don't laugh.  It's a real, official park.  Long story.  Maybe I'll tell it someday.

Summertime! And the living is steamy, as temperatures soar!

Although most temps have been in the nineties, the heat index, the 'feels like' temp, is regularly passing into triple digits.  We are creeping closer and closer to being able to fry eggs on the sidewalk.

We thought we would escape the heat, and escaped for a good chunk of June to a trip to the Pacific Northwest.  We thought wrong.  It was not quite as warm as Georgia, but it was unseasonably warm up there.

Last Fall, we all got the first passports of our lives, and this enabled us to slip into Canada.  We exchanged our money for Canadian currency, which looked like play money, as if somebody allowed Salvador Dali and Picasso to be part of the creative team.  It's very colorful, and has plastic transparent parts, like someone didn't have enough paper to finish it out.

We spent our time in Vancouver, a great little city surrounded by mountains on one side, and water on the other.  It took a day or two to get used to the transport system, but once we did, it was easy to get around to where we wanted to go.  Public transportation and bicycles were more prominent than cars, and Vancouver was very conscious of striving to be a green city.  Everyone had multiple recycling bins, and it took some learning to know where to put which trash where.  It certainly was much different than where we live in Georgia, where everything is just dumped into one big trash can.

They had these delightful free tours (you did leave a tip, if you liked it, which we did)  that you could take, showing different spots and neighborhoods, and being very honest about the sometimes racist and exploitative past.  It was a great history lesson, focusing not on just the famous, but on the everyday lives of everyday people.  I would love to see our local heritage/historical groups put on similar kinds of tours.  It may be difficult to be as honest as our Vancouver tour guides, but it would be refreshing and informative if they could.

We took an AMTRAK train to Portland, Oregon.  It was a fun and relaxing ride, seeing much of the coast line. including the Pacific and Puget Sound.  We passed through Seattle, and we could see the Space Needle from the train.  That was it.  That was all we saw of Seattle.

Portland was weird and wonderful.  Like Vancouver, it had a great public transportation system, and was very conscientious about recycling.  We met a couple of my high school friends there, including one who has been a leader in the recycling movement since he got out of college.  Portland is a very good place for him to be.

A highlight for me was Powell Books, a gigantic bookstore that is a full city block and four stories tall!  Summertime is a great time for reading, and with the serious decline in the number of bookstores (both chain and independent) it was a delight to be in one still going strong!  Our home area no longer has a bookstore, and I miss them.   The decline in reading in this country is alarming. I know e-readers have cut into those who buy paper books, but people just don't read  books, fiction or non-fiction, at the levels they used to.  Do people still read?  I guess so, but now it's short snippets of things on social media, and news sources that are slanted towards their biases, confirming and reinforcing what they already feel.  We are all busy in our own bubbles, reshaping reality to fit what we believe it must be.

Summertime!  And the living is queasy, as we adjust to the one thing even our news feeds can't hide - it's hot and it's only getting hotter!  Bring on July and August!  Just make sure you use plenty of sunscreen!