It’s Sunday and I’m about to leave for Eugene and Cottage Grove. I’ve got a meeting set up with Super Visor, the coordinator of the Hero Alliance and Haul of Justice. Hopefully I can catch one or more of the other superheroes in the area.

I was talking with Love Ninja yesterday, and she said the Hero Alliance has kind of tapered out since Blazing Echidna left, but that there’s still work getting done. I think that’s still great – even though the capes and masks might be gone, they’re still helping people, and obviously that’s the important part.

My internet access has the potential to be pretty spotty for the rest of the trip.

Got to see The Prids, Brett Netson and Built to Spill at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland. I’d seen The Prids play with BTS in the same venue back in 2003, and the bands continue their streak of playing shows together while I’m in town.

The Prids were awesome as always, but had to play kind of a quick set being first. Their set was almost entirely music from the new album, which I’m really excited to finally hear (I haven’t heard it since it’s been mastered). Highlights of BTS included playing a Halo Benders song with Calvin Johnson up on the big video wall (which otherwise played a slideshow of art by Mike Scheer, an awesome artist who did the art for the new BTS album and the last two Prids albums), Center of the Universe, and the big long live version of Broken Chairs for an encore.

After the show, Doug Martsch gathered everyone in the dressing rooms and invited us all back upstairs to the ballroom (which reeked of chlorine) to watch the video for “Conventional Wisdom.” I tried to find it on youtube with no luck. It’s got this middle aged man who is also a knight who teaches the members of Built to Spill the ways of knighthood. It’s pretty funny.

Instead of that clip, which I cannot find, here is already some live footage from last night’s show. Built to Spill, performing “Center of the Universe.”

We had to get up to Seattle to get to Starbucks by 10:30. Steve found us, the interview went quite well, and then he had to go on his way.

The next few hours were a little bit of mental relaxing, since getting to Seattle and finding the stranger was a success. Quentin and I went back to the car to drop off the camera equipment and then roamed around downtown and down by the water.

We ate lunch at this place that I can’t remember the name of, but it was on a pier. They brought out a bunch of seafood – crab, various shellfish, shrimp – along with corn on the cob, sausage and potatoes – and then dumped the bucket on the table and provided you with one of those tiny crab forks and a wooden mallet as the utensils.

It was pretty messy eating, but it was good. The one real drawback was that the shrimp still had their heads, so you had to peel the heads off. What I can only imagine was their liquified brains would sometimes squirt out as you did this. So I kept squirting myself with brownish red shrimp brains. We didn’t finish the shrimp.

We decided to go to Astoria on the way back to Portland to try to find the Goonies house. Traffic on I-5 was way backed up, so it took us probably twice as long to get to Tacoma as it should have, so we didn’t get to Astoria until just before sunset. It was also cloudy, which didn’t help much.

My friend Mike had been there years before when he lived in Eugene, and he remembered finding the house by eating at a restaurant like Dairy Chef (the burger place from Auburn history) and then looking out the window up on the hill and seeing the house. Using those clues (and then a convenient tourist map) we located what we believed to be the Goonies house.

Quentin said, “Do you realize we just drove 120 miles out of the way to take a picture of a house that we’re not even sure is the right house?” It was fantastic.

So then we ate at Geno’s, the restaurant that helped us begin the treasure hunt. We weren’t heading back to Portland until after 10, and it was raining and dark and I had to take windy mountain roads back. That last 75 miles was a long, stressful drive.

I got to my cousin Kendal’s place well after midnight, so very very sick of driving. I’m pretty much in place for the next 2 days, which is nice. I slept for 10 hours. That too was nice, and much needed. Today’s just going to involve hanging out and finalizing interview times for the rest of the trip.

Day 2 was long. After getting out of the smoke-detecting hotel, I then wasted 45 minutes at the most frustrating gas station I’ve ever visited.

The drive was nice – the mountains in Utah were beautiful, and the Columbia River Gorge is one of the most scenic places ever – it just took forever. Somehow I forgot about Idaho. So I was all mentally prepared for the day to go something like “Leave Wyoming, skip through the corner of Utah, and then head on up and around through Oregon!” I was not psychologically prepared for another state, and a big one at that. I thought mapquest must have just been like 6 hours off when it said it’d be 12 to get to Portland.

The good thing about Idaho existing was that I had lunch at Jack in the Box. I don’t think I’ve eaten at Jack in the Box since Sara and I went to San Diego in March ’05. I also got to read the local paper as I sat waiting for them to make my food after I ordered it.

So along the drive, the interview with pop culture writer and Evel Knievel biographer Steve Mandich was set up through a series of phone calls. However, it was set up for 10:30am in Seattle, which meant my night wouldn’t end after reaching Portland.

My friend and former DN co-worker Quentin now lives and works in Portland, and he had the day off, so he was going to come along to Seattle. I stopped at his place for a while to unwind and experience the refreshing joys of the internet, and then we headed north.

We swung through a McDonald’s on the other side of the Oregon / Washington border, and they had bacon cheeseburgers! I’ve never seen those at a McDonald’s. I asked the order-taker in the window if they were a test market for the things, and she didn’t know, but the idea of being a test market really excited her.

They weren’t anything special – they were literally just McDonald’s cheeseburgers with a few strips of really hard bacon on them. Quentin wondered if it wasn’t a way to get rid of the morning’s leftover bacon.

I was getting pretty exhausted by this point, after having spent around 15 hours on the road, so we stopped in Tacoma. I read up on my Human Fly information and checked the equipment, and that was that.

One of the many contributing factors as to why I’m late getting on the road this morning:

I like to let the shower run so the bathroom gets all steamy before I get in. I did this this morning, and some of this steam escaped from the bathroom. Apparently, the smoke detector in my room confuses steam with smoke, and the thing started going off like crazy. I just had to explain through the door to the nice manager lady that my room was not on fire – I just had the shower too hot, which probably sounds too weird to pass as reality, and since the room already smells like illicit substances ingested with the use of fire, I’m probably going to get a fine.

Sometimes you’re just driving along through some amazing scenery and the music you’re listening to is just so perfect, you realize in that instant that it’s like you’re in a well-directed and edited movie. Today was absolutely not that, but the music and scenery were great.

I got kind of a late start, because I let the folks at Jiffy Lube convince me I needed more stuff done to my car. I’m always more susceptible to that kind of pressure before a big trip. So I finally got out of Lincoln around 11am (after leaving yesterday at 7 and getting back this morning around 10).

It didn’t really feel like I was on a trip until I got out of Nebraska. Before leaving Nebraska, it just felt like a mistake. The scenery change into Wyoming helped a lot, especially with building that excitement of knowing that I was doing more than driving to Kearney or something.

But I’ve been on this big kick lately of getting back in touch with music from the past, and the musical theme today was the late 80s and early 90s UK indie dance stuff. I listened to some of “Screamadelica” by Primal Scream, “Queer” by the Wolfgang Press, “Spartacus” by The Farm, and “This is the Day, This is the Hour, This is This” by Pop Will Eat Itself. I also listened to a Rick Emerson show podcast, which reminds me of another thing I’m looking forward to on this trip: getting to hear the Rick Emerson show live, over a radio, rather than delayed via iTunes, which I have not done since 2003.

I tried to take a lot of photos today, but I was taking them as I drove with the windows up. So I ended up with a lot of photos with blurry scenery and sharply focused bug spots on the front windshield or the reflection of my pants through the side windows. I will try to take better photos as the trip goes on, but today and tomorrow are pretty much hardcore driving, so I don’t want to take too much time out for sightseeing.

That said, Wyoming was really pretty. The last time I drove through was in 2001 when I was moving west. The land’s all mountainous and whatnot, but the way the rocks and brush cover the landscape makes it look like the earth is covered by the crumbs you find on apple crisp.

I also passed a biker that, at first glance, looked like Destro driving a motorcycle. The guy was wearing a black leather jacket and a silver helmet and something I can really only describe as a bright red life jacket. The combination made him look a lot like Destro, especially from the back. At first I thought it was someone in some kind of costume, but then I realized it was just coincidental accessorizing.

I called it a night here in Evanston Wyoming. I was hoping to make it into Utah, but there’s some curvy mountain driving up ahead and a storm was coming. I didn’t want to do the curvy mountain driving in the dark with wet roads. This newfound adherence to safety is a sign that I have perhaps matured since past roadtrips.

In my quest to travel as much distance and spend as much time without shoes, I traveled 813 miles today with my shoes off. Out of the 12 hours and 11 minutes between departure and arrival, I was able to spend all but 51 minutes of that time barefoot. Shoes (in today’s case, flip flops) were only worn when standard “No shoes, no shirt, no service” rules would apply.

I am now going to go to sleep in a non-smoking room that smells like someone honored the policy, at least in terms of smoking tobacco, if you catch my drift.

Some of the coolest people I know:

The Davey Awards were Thursday night, and I’m happy that everyone stuck around for a group photo. I’m really going to miss them.

Then Saturday I was an usher in my friends Brandon and Lyndsay’s wedding. Here is fellow usher Matt with the bride.

And then Sunday was my mom’s birthday. My nieces, Melany and Miqaela, were in charge of sprinkling the crunchy little sugar sprinkles on top of the cake. Melany managed to pull off the lid that has the little holes poked in it that allow for moderation in the sprinkling, so instead a whole bottle of it was dumped onto the cake. My mom had to shake off the excess sprinkles so that the frosting wasn’t going to be even crunchier than it was.

Then they helped grandma blow out the candles. Melany didn’t have much luck with hers, so she ended up just kind of staring at it.

I just checked the In-N-Out Locator Map and I’ll be far enough into California to eat there!!!

I think this is the third time I’ve said “I’m about to embark on the last trip for my superhero documentary…”

This one has been thrown together quickly, although it’s been in the works for a while. I only really decided to do it yesterday, after already deciding not to a few times. But the plan now is to leave first thing Tuesday morning, get to Portland, Oregon by Wednesday night (planning on Salt Lake City as my midway stopping point). Then I have 3 days in Portland. On one of those days, I’ll be making a day trip up to Seattle to interview an expert on the Human Fly. The other two days, I’ll be hanging out with various friends and family in Portland. Also, the Prids are opening for Built to Spill on the 16th and 17th, which just coincidentally perfectly fits the plan.

Then I’ll head down to Eugene for the 18th and 19th to meet up with folks from the Heroes Alliance, a branch of the larger superhero network I joined in Mississippi back in December. The Prids are also playing with Built to Spill on the 19th in Eugene. This is just the latest in a series of wacky coincidences when it comes to me passing throug Oregon and the Prids having great shows that fall on those dates.

So after Eugene, it’ll be time to blast down into California, where I’m going to get some footage of the area where the Phantom Patriot’s superhero career met its end, and hopefully be able to talk to some people who were involved in his capture.

I’ll then have 2 days to make it back home to be in time for my 10 year high school reunion, where I can tell everyone I’ve been chasing superheroes for the past 2 weeks.