Fargo is flat, really, really flat. It’s a grid city with wide avenues that are seemingly all under construction. There are neat little houses with neat little yards, but more than that, there are cookie cutter developments, row after row after row of beige homes that all look exactly the same, with drying lawns out front, with trucks in the driveways, with young moms. Fargo is dusty and the air is cool and it reminds me of frontier towns in Alaska more than anything, were frontier towns in Alaska surrounded by the suburbs of my nightmares.… continued…
McMinnville has a darned cute downtown, with brick facades and those tschotke shops your mom likes, and, for some reason, a bronze statue of Ben Franklin – you can sit right next to him on the bench, button your shirt up, ladies, I hear Franklin was quite the lech, but even better, there’s some fine chow in that little town. We found ourselves passing in and out of there a few times on our recent exploration of the upper Willamette Valley and we dined, but good.… continued…
In the last month I found myself chatting with two coffee roasters while they worked, one at Mt. Hood Roasters in Rhododendron, Oregon, and one at Java Kai in Hanalei, Hawaii. I did not admit to either of them that the coffee we drink the most of at our house is Trung Nguyen, a mass produced Vietnamese coffee that we buy ground in big quantities from our local Asian supermarket.
We buy this stuff because, well, we like it.… continued…
On the right, a neighborhood girl and her chicken, Neptune, outside Makeda Coffee in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood. Neptune is a frizzle bantam. She stayed on her leash, tied up to the bench outside until the girls got their drinks.
I asked one of the owners about pets in the shop. “I think I’d draw the line at a chicken,” he said.… continued…
With family in Portland and Eugene, we spend an unlikely amount of time buzzing up and down the I-5 corridor. If I’m flying solo, I take the train and pack a picnic, but with just one extra person it’s cheaper to drive, though a bit of a bore after the 37th time. Coffee isn’t just a luxury, it’s a requirement. We try to stop somewhere different every time, unless we find a real score, and then, we go back.… continued…
