What do you do when you have planned a weekend road trip
with your best friend and it snows three feet in your city?
Go anyway!
That wasn’t the advice I would give. That’s more of the
chance I would take.
My friend and I had been planning a girls’ trip up to
Seattle for months and when we finally nailed down the date and booked our
airbnb, we were stoked. Only one little thing got in our way: Portland was hit
by it’s biggest winter storm yet and we were buried in three feet of snow.
After much deliberation we decided to rent an SUV with
4-wheel drive and try to tough it out. This was not an easy task.
Step 1: To get to the car rental location, I had to walk one
mile in the ice.
Step 2: I boarded the MAX (light rail) and road it for one
hour to the rental location. MAX service had previously been suspended for days
due to the weather, and they had only just started running the trains the day
before. I had no guarantee that my train would not be derailed en route.
Fortunately I made it.
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| light rail station |
Step 3: The car rental agency came to pick me up in a
vehicle with chains and drove me to the center.
Step 4: I get the most bad-ass car on the lot, and load up
on insurance.
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| one of the better roads that was plowed |
Step 5: I creep along the icy roads and pick my friend up at
her place. After a scary could of miles on the war-torn freeway, we made it
out of snow-country and it was smooth sailing for the rest of the trip.
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| at a rest stop on the way to Seattle |
In Seattle we checked into an awesome airbnb in Capital
Hill. Perfect for walking to the restaurants in the international district, and
the bar in Capital Hill. Almost as soon as we arrived we treated ourselves to a
spa experience at The Hot House, an all-women nude spa in the basement of a lesbian
bar. I love Seattle.
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| our bad-ass airbnb |
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| we made it! |
For dinner, we ate the best meal of my life at a Syrian restaurant called Mamnoon. We ordered:
Moushakal: muhammara,
hummus, shamandar bi tahini, baba ganoush
Dolmeh: stuffed vine leaves, sweet
and sour rice, parsley, shallots, labneh
arnabeit makli: fried
cauliflower, tarrator, parsley
kefta: minced beef and lamb,
pistachio, baharat, cherry tomatoes, laban bi khiar
And two desserts, one a tangy custard with pomegranate and homemade
marshmellows, and the other an icecream with chocolate and meringue.
The next day, we had a food feast: Chinese hot pot, Hawaiian
guava cake, Taiwanese bubble tea. Then walked through downtown, stopping off at
Seattle awesome public library and sculpture garden, before visiting the
highlight of the day: Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum. This was a very special
museum for my friend who is a professional florist, and love’s Chihuly’s glass
renderings of flowers.
The day we drove back to Portland, we prepared ourselves for
another long icey drive in the snow by stopping off at Olympus Spa on the way. What
was supposed to be a two-hour detour at the spa (again, another all-women nude
space) ended up being 5+ hours with lunch. This spa was really incredible and
you could easily spend the entire day here. One of the best parts was the Korean
restaurant in the spa, which made delicious chijimi pancakes and soondobu. I
took a photo of us in the restaurant wearing
our spa uniform: a robe and silly pink hair net.
After a long and scary drive, we made it back to snow-laden
Portland a little warmer and happier than before we left.
