3. From Timbuktu to Portland, Maine. Or Portland, Oregon, for that matter…

On day 3 we had our first (well at least for Elena and me was the first) pancake experience… I don’t know… Maybe it was because of the polistirene boxes they used as dishes or maybe because the place itself looked like a polistirene box (we managed to choose the ugliest place to have breakfast in in a 1.5 Miles radius… ), but the thing tasted… well… like polistirene!
After that, “well fed and happy”, we headed to the Stadium, walking all the way through downtown Seattle.
Now, I’m not a soccer fan so I can’t do a comparison with the typical italian stadium, but this one looked really huge to me and really well maintained.
Then we left Seattle… With lots of things unfulfilled I must say, but that’s how life goes isn’t it?
Next stop on our trip plan: Portland, the City of Roses, as they call it.
On the way there, in the middle of Nowhere, WA we had a tasty taco at a Taco del Mar restaurant and we had our first tour into a Wal Mart…
Yes! They have huge supermarkets in the middle of nowhere!
In Canavese, Piedmont, we just have green fields full of cows, sheeps, Heidi, Petar and good old Nebbia, the dog… But after all Canavese IS the middle of nowhere!
Ok, enough with the digression…
We entered this Wal Mart and we started walking around like dogs in search of a nice hydrant or a tree.
A Wal Mart is pretty much like Wonderland for a group of Silly Italians you know?

“Get away from them! They don’t speak english!”

But just like Alice, we had our personal encounter with that Wal Mart version of the Red Queen, i.e. a fat (and when I say fat I really really really mean FAT) mother who, hearing us blabbering in italian, grabbed her little blonde arian girl and pulled her away from us, yelling: get away from them! They don’t speak English!

How sweet!

Well, it was pratically the only episode of “discrimination” we found during the travel. Except that woman, all the other people recognized immediatly our nationality and was eager to learn more about us..

Anyway we reached Portland during the late afternoon… which is always a big mistake, because you end up stuck in the traffic. After a bit we arrived in downtown and started looking for an internet point in order to get some informations about lodgings in portland. Gareth noticed that the city had a free wireless network (of course he started browsing internet and sending photos with his cellphone)! But in order to get some real info we had to resort to the Public library, where you can have one hour of free internet! That’s one amazing service for the clueless tourist. In the end we reserved 2 rooms in a motel 6 outside Portland.

Of course we were ready to look for a restaurant in the evening, so we went back to Portland, but it was already too late for Usa standards (about 9). We went to Chinatown, only to find everything closed and at some point we pledged our destiny to the GPS… unfortunately we didn’t find anything open so we returned at the motel and bought some junk at macdonalds.

The following morning, Gareth fled early from his room and went exploring the neighborood, where
he found a little supermarket! he bought myself a box of fruit… but that’s the start of another story Stay Tuned!

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