We rolled into Eugene in the afternoon and found a little place to stay between the campus and downtown. Eugene has a smaller downtown than we expected, but very nice. Many of you have probably guessed by now that we are in movie withdrawal, so we decided to begin dealing with that in Eugene. There's a great second run theater here where the tickets go for $1.50. We started there with "Ocean's 13". The next day we went to the first run theater and saw "Stardust" (which we both really liked). We saved for last, a small independent theater that is located in an old church. This is the Bijou theater (see picture). It was really a great experience right down to the actual movie, "Death at a Funeral". Yes - in between the movies we did wander around and explore Eugene.
Onto Portland. Now we are in real movie country! We loved Portland. It is a really lovely city - divided by the Willamette river. We walked all through several sections of town. Washington Park was beautiful - containing a fabulous Rose Garden that was huge. There were lots of unique funky restaurants and wine bars and of course tons of theaters, including some in which you can order brews and food. This is definitely our kind of town. We managed two more movies while here. "No End in Sight", which we heartily recommend, and "Becoming Jane", which we really enjoyed and recommend to those of you with a taste for the Jane Austen type English movies.
Well we know that many of you already think we are a little crazy and this will seal it. We were making preparations for Seattle when we both said that the last half of August was making us nostalgic for LBI and the Atlantic. We thought, well maybe we could get some cheap airfares and fly home for a week and then back here to be in Santa Barbara for our rental in Sept and Oct. So we went online and surprise, surprise we found some inexpensive tickets for San Francisco to Atlantic City. So we figured it's only 650 miles or so to San Fran - why not drive down and fly home? So we fly out this evening ( Tuesday) and arrive home Weds AM. We'll fly back on the 30th in plenty of time to get to Santa Barbara by the first.
