Snoqualmie

Asterisk shaking fist asterisk.

If you can think of a thing that people could conceivably just up and start doing on a strictly voluntary basis, it is a good bet that someone in Portland is already doing it. For instance: Breakfast on the Bridges. On the last Friday of every month, some folks set up little tables on two of the bridges and serve donated coffee and pastries to people biking to work. I discovered this last month, when my erratic bike-commuting habits and their regular coffee-serving habits coincided for the first time. I was running so catastrophically late that morning that I figured I'd better not stop, but I did some Googling and discovered that they are in fact on my bridge every month. This is AWESOME, so of course I spent the month of November planning to attend the very next one rain or shine.

Today I practically leapt out of bed, waltzed into my clothes, ventured a quick breakfast but eschewed coffee, sauntered to the garage for my bike, found it in good working condition (unlike pretty much every other time I have mentioned my bike here), and left with ages to spare. Wheee!

But the Broadway Bridge, my regular commute bridge on which I saw the breakfast folks last month, was completely devoid of people and bikes and beverages. No cheery folks calling out to me to stop and be refreshed this time. Nobody else riding, either, which is deeply weird since Broadway is normally so crowded with bike commuters that they start acting almost as rude and annoyed as the car traffic next to them. So what gave?

I Googled when I got to work (early, of course, because I hadn't gotten to stop for coffee). Just now -- this month -- they have decided to permanently change their nothern location from the Broadway Bridge to the Steel Bridge. I went sulking through the "older versions of this page" archive on their website and discovered that they updated the location all of ten days ago. I, naturally, did not check within that time.

The thought did occur to me while I crossed the strangely empty bridge that perhaps the event had been moved. I tried to, without riding off the bridge, squint at the next bridges over and look for signs of companionable breakfasting. The next one to the north is a freeway bridge with no bike lanes, so that obviously wasn't it. To the south is, in fact, the Steel Bridge, but in my coffee-less slowness I was looking at the vehicular upper deck instead of the lower pedestrian deck. So I saw nobody, so I didn't turn around and head over and join the revelers even though I had plenty of time to do so. Of course they were on the lower deck.

Portland: people doing really awesome things which Dianna keeps fucking missing, damnit, through shit luck and relatively little fault of her own.