July 4th, 2007

Seeing we had a long weekend coming up we decided to do a roadtrip to Portland, Oregon. There were a few motives behind this trip… The first; Tash’s old kindergarten friend (Cindy) from Indonesia lives there so she wanted to visit her, and the second (probably the real motive) was the TAX FREE SHOPPING!!! We went with Tash’s sisters’s family and her mom and soon we were crusing the I5…

We set off early Saturday morning and headed over the border and stopped in Tulalip just outside of Seattle. This is where all of the major brands like Banana Republic, Nike, Guess, Sony etc have their factory outlets. The minute we parked in the parking lot I could see the look in Tash’s eyes… She was like a woman possesed hypnotized by the sale sign and promise of retail therapy!

I came across the Ecko Unlimited Outlet factory where I ended up spending most of my time… I’ve always been a fan of the brand Ecko Unlimited which is designed by Marc Ecko. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a hip hop clothing label that was established in 1993 and is renowned for it eye catching graffiti prints and and urban styling. I love the styling and admire the work that goes into each design.

Once we finally managed to drag the ladies away from the shops we made our way through Seattle and finally arrived in Portland. It is a very quaint little city situated on the riverside. Everyone was friendly and I couldn’t believe how tidy the city was. The area we stayed in could be likened to Subiaco with its cafes and restaurants with small boutique stores scattered along the strip.

We spent the day walking up and down the waterfront, and took some time out the have a splash in the water fountain with the kids. Only after we finished playing in the fountain, did we read the warning sign that stated the main jet is strong enough to throw a fully grown man!!! Oooooops…. 

The next highlight of the trip would have to be the Apple store. This weekend, the US saw the launch of Apple’s Iphone. After much hype and endless waiting, the product was finally released and they were selling like hot cakes. Apple has been very smart in their marketing ploy; because if you walk into any of their stores they have about 20 fully functional phones on display for you to play with and experiment. They even have data plans and phone service to trial the quality of their services! While I was mucking around with the phone I decided to try the SMS feature. I hit reply to the last message that was in the phone and typed “are you there yet?”. At this time I didn’t realise that the phone was actually “live” so when I hit the send button I got a reply back:

“Yeah man… I’ve left the country and I’m not coming back until this Iphone BS blows over…”

I found this pretty hilarious because I can imagine how many people are going to get prank calls and bogus sms’s due to the free access that Apple is providing for these demo units.

Everytime we go the US, Nia always tells us to go and try The Cheesecake Factory. So this time we made a special effort to go there. The venue is very glamorous and I would say it is like an upmarket Cactus Club. The food was quite nice, but the cheesecake was definitely the main feature of the whole meal… The variety was endless which made it hard to decide and by the end of it all I decided on a classic… plain New York cheesecake. 

 

The Roadtrip was fun, but I think travelling 600km each way for just a weekend was a bit much… We definitely need to spend more time at the destination because by the end of it all we needed a holiday to recover from our holiday! I learnt two things from this trip…

1. Never travel by car to anywhere that crosses the US border on a weekend where both Canada AND the US are having a public holiday unless you want to spend you weekend sitting in your car while you wait to cross the border… We ended up spending nearly 5 hours on the way home

2. If you’re doing “Tax free shopping”… make sure you buy enough stuff to justify the distance travelled to take advantage of “Tax free shopping”! By the time you calculate how much you save on taxes, and factor in the cost of petrol… make sure you’re saving money by the end of it! I don’t think we did nearly enough shopping to justify the distance travelled!

All in all it was nice to hit the road and see more of this large continent… until next time…

Are we there yet…?