Oregon, Day 7 - Bend

Friday we spent the day driving to Bend and hanging out in that area of central Oregon. We also went to the lava fields around Newberry Crater, but that'll be "Day 7 - part II!"

First up...bizarre public art in downtown Bend. What's with the metal duck on the dude's shoulder? And between the dude and the first duck, and that second duck there to the left, this whole bench is pretty much rendered a prop! I like art in public places, and the idea behind this piece is neat, but there were a boatload of folks strolling around Bend, and what the city needed the most was the bench. Don't lose sight of the core purpose of government everyone.

Another bagel shop, another "New York Times" paper rack sitting empty with a tattered note. This one basically tells the cheap-skate agro-urbanite pot-puffers of Bend that they need to actually buy their newspapers...it aint a Library after all!

Ask for a paper though...and you will NOT get the Times. Sorry Steve!


Da street...nicely shaded, and with some useful features like bike racks and such. However...



...about those bicycles. Hey, isn't Oregon supposed to be blindly in hot sweaty lust over the bicycle? Not that I saw. Looks a lot like most places actually, no better no worse. As a cyclist though, I can say that the biggest difference is that the rest of the population of Oregon seems so much more accepting of other folks, like cyclists. Not like here in FLA where drivers will chuck a D cell battery at your head at 55mph if given half a chance...

This street performer was in this location so long, and I watched him the whole time so I know, that the residual greenish-grey clouds exhaled onto the street scape by the Bend pot-puffers actually demented my mental faculties into believing that he was made of rocks and plumbing supplies. That crazy weed is out of control!

Pot-puffing agro-towns are stuffed to the gills with these kind of bad ass rigs. Boulder was the same way when I was out there. Here a Toyota FJ-55, universally nick-named "The Pig", sits in the parking lot of a local shop. Not a drug dog was to be found though, and I point that out because this thing in the state of Florida would have triggered a K9 scratch-and-sniff search just by being in the public domain. That's not gasoline you smell!

Bend was a trip. We ate at the Bend Brewing Company and sampled the local boozes. We split a sampler of the 10 beers that they currently had on tap (little 4 oz'ers...not 10 full beers!) and for the first time in my life, the sampler was ALL good. There wasn't one skunky dog-stink nectar on the tray. Bend Brewing Company gets a thumbs up. We'd been drinking Deschutes Brewery fair at the house, and that stuff is tasty too, so thumbs up to them both.

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I couldn't tell you how the beers go over with the pot-puffing. I'm too old for that.