We now return to our regular programming

We are back on the road after a full week in Portland.

We had a good, if somewhat exhausting, conference, which ended Sunday night. We spent a good deal of Monday recovering, and trying to get more details posted on the conference blog (I'm still not done with that). Monday evening we decided to take advantage of the fact that our transit passes still had another full day on them, and rode the bus down to the Olive Garden. It turned out to be only half a mile away, so we worked off some of our pasta by walking back. Chalk the close Olive Garden up as another selling point for this particular stopover.

The dog's ear has been bothering her lately -- we noticed she has been shaking her head a lot. So yesterday morning was given over to taking her to the vet. It turns out that Tri-Met allows pets on board, so long as they are in a carrier, so we walked her over to the Max station and put her in her cage for one stop, then had another two block walk to the vet. Even though we couldn't see it that far down, she had a mild infection in both ears. So we've got a couple weeks of antibiotic drops ahead of us. And kudos to Portland Tri-Met for the pet policy -- evidence of a real commitment to getting people out of their cars (along with the generous pass policy, and the fact that the entire downtown core is "fareless").

After the vet, Louise brought Opal back home, and I headed to OMSI, where I had a hankering to see the submarine. I lucked out: being the only person to show up for my scheduled tour time, I got a private showing. Last night we used our passes one last time to go to dinner downtown at Pazzo, an upscale Italian place in the historic Hotel Vintage Plaza.

This morning we finally buttoned up and headed south, stopping in Salem to do laundry. Tomorrow morning we need to be in Harrisburg to deal with getting the carpet replaced, so tonight we are at the Pioneer truck stop (map), essentially a big lot behind a Travelodge hotel, a restaurant, and a 76 station with a truck island. The place is familiar, as it was a regular food stop for us when we were hauling up and down I-5 in the car while Odyssey was under construction (although I note that the hotel was a Best Western in those days). We had a nondescript dinner in the restaurant, just to make ourselves official customers.

We've gone for a good couple weeks without any real bus-related problems, so we were due: when we got parked here, we noticed that air was rushing out of the right-front ride-height valve. The valve is sort of stuck in a mode where air is trying to to into the bag from the supply side, at the same time it is venting out of the bag from the exhaust. We've seen this before, on the left side valve -- the cure was to disassemble, clean, and rebuild the valve. I didn't want to start that at 6:30 in the evening, so we'll spend the night with no air at all (and the front door held closed with bungees) and I will take care of it tomorrow while the carpet is being replaced. I have my fingers crossed that cleaning the valve will do the trick -- if it needs to be replaced, we could be in for a long wait.