I spent most of the day yesterday travelling from Montreal to Portland for RecentChangesCamp 2007. I got a pretty decent last-minute ticket with flyer miles from Aeroplan, but the flight took me through Washington (D.C.) which was probably 2-3 hours out of my way.
The first leg of the flight was great -- one of those nice puddle-jumpers with leather seats and lots of legroom. I got into Dulles and had time for an impressive (for airport food) pair of crabcakes at the Tidewater bar and restaurant. I shared a table with Mary Beth from Albany (New York), who was en route to Beijing to adopt a 1-year-old baby girl. We had a pretty good talk.
The second leg was brutal, though. It was three big guys in a three-seat row on a crowded 6-hour flight. (Just before they closed the doors, the guy in the aisle seat scooted over to an open seat in the adjacent row. We all laughed at dodging the bullet of having to sit on top of each other... then the family who had those seats made a last-minute rush for the plane, and aisle-guy moved back to Elbonia with us. We sat in sullen silence for the rest of the flight. Gar.)
I managed to distract myself by reading The Good Earth and watching Marie Antoinette (2006 film), which was actually really good. I'd heard about the soundtrack -- New Wave -- and thought it'd be an anachronistic distraction from the period, but it turned out to fit very well. Between the two I managed to keep myself from going insane.
I got a nice Mazda 6 from Hertz at the airport and after missing the 84 turn-off and driving 20 miles out of my way (and back again) I got to my hotel for the weekend. The Jupiter Hotel is a remodeled cheap-o motel on Portland's hip East Side. The rooms have been stripped of their clown paintings, fly-specked wallpaper and floral-print bedspreads, and replaced with a spare, pleasant décor reminiscent of a smart European DJ lounge or an Ikea catalog. Free Wi-Fi, full-length chalkboards on the doors for doodlers, organic soaps and shampoo. French press for morning coffee. Branded jimmy-hat with a big J on it next to the bed. Isn't that sweet?
The place reminds me a bit of boutique hotels like the Hotel Palomar in San Francisco, but it doesn't quite have the full high-end feel. After all, if you look at it through squinty eyes, the room is a cinder-block motel cell, and the nice look doesn't quite hide that. But a regular room rate starting at $79/night is hard to beat.
There's an outdoor fireplace, pleasant grounds, and lots of bare hewn logs around the lot. The adjacent Doug Fir Lounge has impressively medium-name music acts and a really nice post-modern ski-lodge look. I'm a bit worried about noise tonight (the complimentary earplugs in the bedstand have be concerned), but my room is waaaay in the back of the lot, away from the lounge, so hopefully it won't be too bad.
The Doug Fir also has a restaurant, and I'm sitting there right now writing this entry. I just had a very tasty smoked-salmon eggs benedict (bénédictine, for you Montrealers out there), and once I finish this sentence and my surprisingly decent decaf, I'm off for RCC07.
tags: recentchangescamp rcc07 portland dulles travel jupiter hotel doug fir lounge hotel