a-b=c

For a 5-week adventure across the grand Unites States of America, Molly and I did fairly well with not having any problems. The check engine light did come on a few times but we determined it was from the drastic climate changes so nothing to worry about...And then there was Portland, OR. Now don't get me wrong, Portland is a beautiful city and I have nothing wrong with the city itself. I don't have any hard feelings against the city, just at a certain cop on a motorcycle.

Let me backtrack just a little. Molly and I arrived in Troutville, OR after a lonnng, lonnng drive from Yellowstone Park, through Montana, Idaho and across the vast, open lands of Eastern Washington and Oregon. Although I found it dreadfully boring at the time (I think because it was such a long day), I am shocked at the landscape of Oregon and how there is a city like Portland that is so green and splendorific and then 200 miles east it's like the Great Plains of the Midwest.

The next morning we met up with Mark and Morgan (my sister-in-law) for breakfast and caught up with how their honeymoon in Hawaii went as they'd only returned a few days before. We then headed downtown so I could take Molly to Powell's Books, an excellent, fantastic, massive used book store. It has the atmosphere of a small business, cute bookstore but it's twice the size of Barnes and Nobles. We're both a sucker for used books so its right up our alley and we spent an hour or two browsing around.

As we still had a busy afternoon planned in Astoria, we departed around 1030 and hopped on the highway headed west. I don't remember if I've mentioned it before but we completed this trip with no GPS and a road atlas that was 10 years old. So sometimes in busier places or ones with bad signage we didn't always get onto the correct roadways. I don't remember how it happened, but we ended up getting off the highway by accident so we had to turn around and sidetrack to get back to where we wanted to be. So we're going through the backroads and finally arrive at a T-intersection that plops us right back on the state highway we'd accidentally got off. Cars are zooming by, and on the green we take the left and Molly accelerates. Not even 10 seconds later we see the flashing lights. So we pull over and the cop comes up and does the routine. Asks us if we know the speed limit, which we don't because we'd only been on the road for mere seconds. I don't think we'd even passed a speed limit sign yet. He points to one right in front of us and says we were going 52 and a 35mph zone. As we're waiting for the cop to come back from writing us a ticket we notice that cars passing us by are certainly not going 35 mph.

The worst part of it was that when he gave us the ticket and asked us if we had any questions, we said "no" and went on our merry way. When I finally got around to reading the ticket he'd marked us as going 52mph in a 35 mph zone (as told to us) yet also marked it as 21-30 miles over the speed limit, which determined, in part, the amount we owed. 52-35=17!!!!!! So much hate!!!! And since we weren't going to be in the state to go to appeal in court we had to write a letter to mail in. And as we were on the road up until needing to be in court, we couldn't wait until we got home and had a computer to type it. So the State of Oregon received a nice handwritten note from us regarding our cop's complete lack of basic math skills. (It didn't really say it like that but it did mention that we were charged unfairly).

So that was our experience in Portland. I don't like cops in Portland.