Hey there dear readers, the last two weeks have been a blur. We’ve hit the ground running since landing in Portland. About twenty minutes after we got off the train we ran into someone we knew! It was a total small world experience. We had stayed with Logan and Tammy while we were in Sacramento healing up from my burnt hand and Laura’s flu. We became friends with he and his wife Tammy of RowdyKittens fame. It was totally indicative of our trip and how we’ve just managed to meet some amazing people along our journey.

If that wasn’t enough of a surprise, we met our friend Ethan (we camped in his backyard in Portland at the very beginning of our trip), who helped us find a place to stay and got us some furniture so we wouldn’t be sitting on the carpet all winter. We walked in and he had an iPod playing and a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. It was an utterly amazing welcome and we were nearly moved to tears as we stood there in the middle of the apartment just absolutely stunned at what was going on.

We’ve been spending the last few days getting use to not moving. The whole trip has made us appreciate everything SO much more. It is just bliss to wake up every morning in a bed, to be able to boil water to make coffee, to have refrigeration to store bacon, to use a clean bathroom and to have some quiet personal space once again.

That said, we’re hard at work trying to raise the finances for our next adventure. Laura is making headbadges and Bike Mustaches like crazy for BikeCraft.

I’ve been trying to grow my network in Portland so I can land some freelance jobs, which has been proving to be difficult. I’m starting over from scratch and there is something challenging and exhilarating about that. Yet at the same time, constantly watching pennies is growing frustrating. Hopefully, I’ll meet the right people soon.

In the meantime, I’ve been diving into the bicycle community. I’ve started a series called “Pedal People” which will be a series of multimedia profiles of people involved in bike culture in Portland (there’s a few, I think). They’re being posted on BikePortland, a great site that inspired me many years ago to be an advocate for bicycling.

So we’re working hard and trying to save. We’ve got lots of plans in the incubation stage for our next adventure. We’ll be posting about the readjustment period, the saving and our plans soon. I know that most travel blogs I’ve followed usually end after a trip and there is never any discussion about all the mental goings on of reintegration. I’ve always found that misleading, so we’ll be writing about that. We’ll also be doing lots of short bike tours from Portland to the surrounding parks, we’ll be doing more gear reviews and more other great touring tidbidts so stay tuned!