Josh and Rachel Take a Trip

How do you set off a beautiful wine tasting? Burger King for lunch.

St. Josef’s Winery, located in Canby, Oregon. Wine tasting time!

The woman that poured our tasting was a Russian-to-German-to-American immigrant. She didn’t talk much beyond the process of making each kind of wine. I was hoping she would tell us exactly what the heck we were tasting, but no such luck. We just used words like “fresh” and “delicious” a lot (all true!).

Dad strikes a pose, pinky artfully extended.

Giant vats full of under-done wine. We wondered if we could fill and make off with the bucket on the top of the fourth one over. Each vat was labeled, so we knew which of the ones we had just sampled were still brewing.

Dad and I stole grapes from this bin, and they were the BEST GRAPES EVER.

Two out of three of my favorite boys.

Aw.

Seth took the day off of school to hang (don’t worry it was toga day). We hung at Denny’s for a couple hours and chilled. Once home, we went to Wally’s the neighborhood instrument store.

Josh tried out some guitars.

Seth gave a few trombones a good test drive, settling on a new Jupiter. He was very excited, skipping dinner to polish and play with it.

After dinner we headed to Jimmy Max’s for some righteous jazz. I don’t always understand jazz, but I always appreciate it. It was a great night.

Dad checking his paper map, while Josh checks the satellites’ maps.
With two great minds on the case, we got there super fast.

A cosmic monkey by Aaron Renier.

First stop: Cosmic Monkey Comics, located in the Hollywood part of Portland. Josh and I spent a lot of time overloaded by the awesome options. Initiate glee coma.

There was a yummy burger lunch at Blitz, plus a couple local beers: Mirror Pond and Total Domination. Both had a nice bite to them, but my MP had a delightful fruitiness.

It’s not my birthday. Silly wall.

After that, we headed downtown to meet one of Josh’s friends Ian, who teaches at PSU and has a sweet letterpress. Josh and my dad joined Ian at his evening class at PSU so Josh could repeat his FlashPitt presentation.

To Powell’s for books and Buffalo Exchange for some clothes shopping. Homeward bound for some yummy soup and grilled cheese and an exciting game of dice. Woo!

My rule while in Portland is to try and do my best not to get anything I could get at home. We do not have a Canby Pub & Grill. CHECK.

I do not know of a place in Pittsburgh that serves pickled onions on their Club Sandwich with a side of what my mom calls The Best Potato Salad, so: CHECK.

We totally have walls of beer in Pittsburgh, but they had a whole herd of local Oregonian beers in this here wall, so: CHICKITY-CHECK.

…and then mom and I shopped our brains out.

Today was Seth’s 18th birthday, and we celebrated after he got home from school with pie and ice cream. He requested pie over a birthday cake, under no influence from me I swear. He opened presents and we made a family pile to commemorate his rise into adulthood, and he played Halo until band practice. I hope it was everything he wanted it to be. His wish list included a mail order bride and a BMW, so I fear we may have fallen a bit short.

Josh then introduced Dad to the underground universe that is Craigslist. I’m pretty sure Dad thought they were driving to meet a shady man in a questionable part of town, but in reality they drove to posh suburb to a house that simply upgraded to a laptop and didn’t want their monitor anymore. It’s bigger than the one that was fried — mom expressed shock that their desktop background had a barn. Score!

Oh hello there, 3 hour time difference.

Mom’s flowers around 6am.

We went to Fred Meyers supermarket and got a six pack of beer and two bottles of wine. At 9am. On a Sunday. Suck it, Allegheny county, Pennsylvania.

Portland does ketchup right.

Mom relieves stress by coloring. She has like three of these giant posters.

Once upon a time, Josh got the Tris application on his iPhone, which I quickly stole and took the highest score. His goal for months has been to slowly nudge my score off of the High Scoreboard. He accomplished just that this night, then haughtily challenged me to try again to get a High Score.

Isn’t that cute?

Josh and Seth both had scathing critiques on my game play, but Righteoustetris struck with grand success — I now hold the second highest score. Again. Can I mention that I haven’t played on the iPhone in months? That challenge, it’s just adorable.

More games: Bowling. It’s on like Donkey Kong.

It’s probably been at least ten years since we all went bowling. We had the bowling alley to ourselves, and it was super fun drinking alongside mom and dad. There was some glorious trash talk. I must say we were exceptional bowlers, with frighteningly good form and earth-shattering strikes. Some of us even broke 100.

Seth was in charge of the board. Mom’s turn read “Miller Time”.

One of Canby’s cougars taking a bite out of Dad.

We celebrated Seth’s last hours of being seventeen with coffee, hash browns, and a chicken melt with fries.

Ah, to be young again… What am I talking about? I think we did that a couple weeks ago.

Wow, it’s been a year since Europe. We’re not quite as far away from home as last time, but we’re hoping we’re far enough away that our responsibilities won’t find us.

Pittsburgh International Airport is a mess at 5am on a Saturday. Adventures on two planes and three airports included: watching two weary fathers make friends through their adorable toddler daughters on the moving walkway, a woman performing a voodoo dance in front of a plane lavatory, a seatbelt snake fight (we were sleep-deprived, shut up), and Josh navigating a too-full coffee cup through some rough turbulence (it didn’t make it).

Josh plays with an interactive Traveler’s ad at Minneapolis’s airport.

PDX was full of dogs undergoing therapy training, so that was a nice surprise from Portland. I quickly fell in and out of love with a bright white dog whose breed must be Adorable Abominable Snowman.  Aw.

Dad picked us up and we embarked on a quest for lunch.  Once at home, my brother showed us videos of his school’s marching competitions, then we went to watch his open band practice. Seth is over six feet tall, two days away from turning 18, and driving his own car.

Let me repeat that: he’s driving. The horror!

Seth has been playing trombone for years, and he is really into it. Since we’ve been on separate coasts since he was ten years old, I haven’t really had the pleasure of watching him play.

Open practice from 6 - 10pm.

There is nothing better than live music, and watching Seth do something he obviously loves (and is very good at) is even better. They did some marching outside, too, and we watched until we froze out.

Both my mom and Josh were band geeks in their day, so they could comment intelligently. I was just amazed to see a bunch of teenagers moving into what might have been a straight line with minimum yelling. Once back inside they worked on “dynamics” — or the varying levels of volume in a piece — and blew us away working on a Chicago song. AWESOME.

We lasted almost an hour after getting back to the house, and then fell into West Coast Comas because we’d been awake forever.

It’s nice to see the family, and though it rained most of the day (and is supposed to do so all week), it is so great to be away.

And that’s it. We arrived safe and sound back in Pittsburgh last Monday, our bodies dragging at something like 2:30am London time. We went back to work the next day and have been slowly recovering from jetlag since.

The whole trip was a fantastic adventure. Josh has already proclaimed that we must go back, and we’re thinking it might be something we try and do every five to ten years.

Our entire outlook on life has changed. Josh eats granloa now. We want wine with every meal. We’re upset at how manufactured everything tastes. We have a great distaste for anything wasteful. I am more excited than ever to replant my garden in the spring. We’re looking for a good bakery, even though we know they can’t recreate a beautiful french baguette. We are both creatures that are eternally trying to streamline — now we’ve got better ideas of how to do so after seeing how the Europeans do it.

…and we are delighted to discover that Giant Eagle sells Orangina!

Traveling so far away has also made us realize some of the wonderful resources that the U.S. has to offer, too. I’d like to see DC, Seattle, San Francisco, New York. Maybe Las Vegas, and some less popluar cities. I want to return to Chicago, Portland, Charleston, SC. I’d like to check out some of our National Parks…

I can’t wait to take more adventures!

We’re back in our homebase in Pittsburgh, but we intend to roam more in the future. It’s hard to top Paris, but we can try. If you’re interested in following one of us while we’re not traveling, you’re free to check out our other blogs: The Sum of David and Josh Sager Media.

When we were still in Normandy, getting our fix of the internet we’d been missing over the previous week, Josh was catching up on his sports news. Interestingly enough, the Chargers and Saints were playing in London… on what would be our last day.

I’d wanted to check out a football game — soccer, I mean — but that wasn’t possible. Instead, we thought we’d experience an American Football game instead, but in London. It might sound silly since we can see an NFL game at home, and for the team we love, but our real interest was in experiencing the NFL experience in London — the stadium for one (some of the Olympic trials will take place there in 2012) and, more specifically, how the locals supported it, if at all.

The crown of England’s national game will always be passionately held by soccer, but we were surprised to find there was support for American Football, too. We were in Madame Toussad’s later than we meant to be, so we rolled up on the stadium at the start of the second quarter. Emerging out into the open dome was pretty impressive.

65 degrees with a very light wind, snuggled in to watch some pigskin with our 83,226 closest English and American friends? Sigh. It doesn’t get much better than that. It was a high scoring game, and the crowd reacted accordingly. Josh and I are Steelers fans through and through, but when in Rome (or London)… We let our fantasy football teams be our guides: Josh and the boys on his left wanted the Chargers to win, me and the boys on my right wanted the Saints to win.

The Saints won 37-32, which was fun even if it wasn’t enough to secure my FF victory. The crowd was more polite (and less drunk) than the games I’ve been to in the States, but they were also faster to boo. And, after a couple failed attempts, the whole stadium did “the wave”, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen at Heinz Field. It was so much fun to watch that I couldn’t stop laughing.

Imagine 84,000 people filtering out of a giant stadium… and into a single metro station. It sounds like a mess, but the London mounted police allowed us into the station in waves, and we were on a train headed back to our hotel in under an hour. It was a tight squeeze for the 12 mile ride back into London, but it was efficient, and an easier process than, say, getting the two miles from Heinz Field back to our house at home.

Josh was giddy that our honeymoon involved any kind of football. I think that means my football education is now officially complete. I had wanted to end the trip on some kind of event, since it might otherwise feel like we were just waiting for the time to leave. This was a perfect adventure… the perfect end to the perfect trip.

(Thanks mom and dad!)

Since our time in London was so limited, we were forced to pair down our visits, especially in light of our fantastic evening activities. We braved the rain to find Abbey Road, of Beatles fame. The crossing that the Beatles walked across in the famous picture is actually a busy roadway. The drivers patiently wait for fans to cross. We watched one girl go back and forth several times, obviously embarrassed, but not humiliated enough to stop doing it. She just kept laughing, and it was fun to watch.

We went in search of lunch next, in the area of our next destination. We walked into a bar right outside Paddington Station and oh my it was like the United Nations of American Football: a huge bar, filled with jerseys from every team in the NFL. We searched in vain for a table, but alas, nothing was open and we were forced to leave our glorious brethren for alternative sustenance. We were sad — we would have loved to make friends.

A short note about where we ate. First, the smell — it was beautiful, because I spell heaven G-A-R-L-I-C. Yum. Second, they had a Dyson AirBlade in the bathroom. Not familiar with the AirBlade? The guy that designs the fantabulous Dyson vacuums designed a hand dryer the uses an intense line of air to wipe your hands dry. You stick your wet hands in, pull them out the top and holy smokes, the machine has wiped them dry. With air. It would blow your mind too if you tried it.

Our next stop was Madame Toussad’s Wax Museum. Rick Steves said it was silly but lots of fun, and I thought it would be a good addition to our last day. What it was, was ridiculous. Usually I am a pretty solid introvert, but for some reason I jumped into this experience with fervor, assertively nudging girls out of the way so I could get my picture with fake (sometimes really fake) celebrities.

Aw.

Cameron thinks I’m hilarious.

Hawkings and I discuss the secrets of the universe.

Bush and I discussing his presidency. I used small words.

Tom Cruise. Crazy short. Or crazy and short.

Ensigns Sager reporting for duty, Cap’n. Ha!

It ended up being super fun, even if I had to beg to get Josh to pose. When we finally emerged, we were late for our final engagement…

TO BE CONTINUED!

The Church Street Hotel is located in Southeast London, below the Thames river. Taking advantage of its location meant learning the bus routes, which ended up being much easier than anticipated. The snazzy double deckers got us nearly everywhere we needed to go, and you could buy a day pass right at a machine at the bus stop.

We saw The London Eye, which is a 900 feet tall ferris wheel that gives a great view of the city.

Then we walked across the river to Big Ben.

…and showed a little support for our Big Ben back home!

A few blocks later was Buckingham palace, which is underwhelming (especially after the magnificence of France’s monuments).

Josh’s cold from Normandy hit me hard today, so I was happy to sit in the hotel’s lounge and chill for the rest of the evening.

The hotel is really very nice. You get a lot of room for London, even if there’s a catacomb of stairs to get to your room. It’s clean, it’s got great flavor and interior design, their lounge and breakfast were supreme and oh, what’s that? Honor bar? Awesome! An early bedtime for me and my clogged head, and Josh caught up on his drawing.