The Road Trip Part 4. Land of Ports

Pictured: Everything
being great.

So I made it to Portland after a long and somewhat uneventful drive. It turns out that the trip between Eureka and Portland is exactly long enough to listen to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Audiobook): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction in it's entirety. Which was convenient. Highly recommended.

I managed to spend my first night couch-crashing at my friend Mel's house. I know her from The Internet. She was very cool and she had two extremely friendly cats. I had settled down to fall asleep when one of them literally leapt on top of me and made himself comfortable. It wasn't so bad until he started doing that thing from that cartoon with the bulldog. I had to put on a sweater so the claws didn't get through. Once that was settled, everything was great.

BREAKFAST OF
CHAMPIONS.

The next morning was pretty fun. Mel took me to a little local diner-y place where I ate a rather nice breakfast. But after seeing their 7 foot tall rotating jewel case filled with Pie I decided "what the hell" and got a slice of strawberry pie for breakfast. It was delicious. I hung out with Mel and another Internet buddy named Rhiannon.

I realize that there's a lot of links in this text. Hrm. I should probably slow down.



Anyway we had a good day of hanging out, drawing, and eating sushi off of a little model-train. Then later on I was informed that there was one place, above all others, that I needed to go in Portland.

That place was called Ground Kontrol. I seemed to have lucked out, as it happens, that the last wednesday of the month is free-to-play night, where all the machines are free and you just pay a five-dollar entrance fee. Also (like everywhere else in Portland apparently) they have liquor.

So I went in and got my wrist stamped, immediately assaulted by neon-retro-joy. The upper floor was all pinball machines and a few crazy old games. The kinds of things that used dials instead of buttons and had the kind of brutality that you never see in today's games.




I went up to the bar and checked a little plastic menu. I saw something that looked fascinating and ordered it with a White Russian because I am manly like that.

I regret nothing.

This is what I got.

It's a Nutella and Banana Sandwich with melted marshmallows on toasted sourdough.

So anyway, Videogames.

I spent some time playing your standard classics: Gauntlet (Warrior), Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (Gambit/Venom/Warmachine) and a little bit of Simpsons (Homer) and Turtles in Time (Donatello, duh.) But no matter where I went I always ended up coming back to this damn thing:

Fig A. distilled arcade euphoria.

FOUR PLAYER PAC-MAN BATTLE ROYALE.

Oh my god this is the best arcade game ever, we played for like two hours and the machine has little cup-holders for beer. 

I have decided that if I am ever a billionaire genius playboy philanthropist I want this thing in every room.

Also the bathrooms were cool and Tron-designed on the inside, but I found myself more impressed with this.


Anyway that was pretty awesome. But we're just getting started.