Trip to Oregon: Part III

There was no blog post on Monday, because I spent the morning coming home from a week-long stay in Portland, Oregon. We flew up there last Thursday to attend the Saturday wedding of one of my older brothers, and, as you might image, it was wonderful and fun and amazing!

(I strive to maintain quite a bit of anonymity in this blog; I write under a pseudonym, I never name members of my family, and the artsy photo to the left with my face half covered in the only picture you'll probably ever see of me. Because I have four older brothers that I'll want to talk about in this blog, however, I'm going to give them all titles: from oldest to youngest, they are Brother S, Brother D, Brother X, and Brother N - and then me, Kenna).

Brother D was the one getting married this weekend, to a wonderful woman he introduced us to last Thanksgiving. They announced that they were engaged sometime last spring, and we've been preparing ever since (well, mom has been preparing since my brother met her parents at Christmas, but moms are just like that). His in-laws live in the Portland area, so they decided to hold the wedding up there, with an open house down here in Southern California and another in Utah where they both live.

My family flew up Thursday out of the Long Beach airport, which isn't really an airport (it's more like a small terminal building with portables tacked up and a bunch of airplanes parked out back, with a half-baked TSA station in between). Brother X, who lives near us, rode up with us, and we met Brother N, who almost made us miss our flight, at the portables. Our parents paid for all of us to fly up to the Portland airport (which is a real airport), where we met Brother D and checked in at our hotel.

We had most of Friday to ourselves, so while our parents went out, my brothers and I hung around the hotel, trying to entertain ourselves. Offhandedly, I mentioned that we could always go geocacheing, and within minutes Brother D had downloaded a geocache app onto his smartphone and located three different caches within a half mile of our hotel. With nothing better to do, we went out and attempted to locate the hidden cache, aided by Brother D's friend and old roommate.

Geocaching isn't something we actually do in my family, so the first hidden cache, marked 'easy', took us over a half hour to find. We finally realized that the cache clue, "LPC," was a common geocaching term for "Lamp Post Cache," and discovered the little container hidden under the parking lot lamp post. After adding our names, we went after the second one, another LPC, which took us about five-ten minutes to find. The third cache we found that Friday was hidden on a nearby hiking trail, and was much more difficult to uncover (there was supposed to be another on that same trail, which we never found).

The third cache, in a bit of hollowed out log. Brother X found it, like a boss.

I really wanted to go to Powell's bookstore again, a must for any book-lover visiting Portland, but mom had some trouble navigating the streets and we ran out of time before we had to head back to get ready for that night's dinner.

Brother S and his wife drove up the whole way, and made it sometime that afternoon, with plenty of time to join us for dinner. I tried to sit next to them, hiding among my own family members so I wouldn't have to socialize, but instead I was invited to sit with the bride's sisters and her other bridesmaids. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a bit of a recluse, and that given the option I'd tend to stay away from new people, but I decided then that it was really important to try to get to know the bride's family, so I accepted and moved over with them. I'm glad I did; they're different from my family in that they're much more outgoing, but they're super nice and very fun to talk with.

I woke up early Saturday morning to go over to the bride's family's house and have my hair and makeup done before the wedding. My hair is about shoulder length and between curly and wavy, and I hardly ever do anything to it besides tying the sides back. A family friend worked on my hair, applying hair-control stuff and giving me thick curls, something I would never have thought of to do. It looked pretty great afterwards, if I do say so myself, and I left them in for the remainder of the weekend.


The actual wedding was held on Saturday morning, at the Portland LDS temple. The day, as most days seem to be around Portland, was overcast and chilly, and while that may have been nothing special for the natives, to a desert rat like me it was wonderful. The sun broke through for a while while we were taking pictures, and Brother X, who's an amateur filmmaker with a video blog, got a lot of great footage.

The reception was late that afternoon, so in the interim, Brother S took me and Brother N out to get food for the coming day. I showed up to the fancy reception in my tennis shoes, expecting to walk over to Powell's nearby afterward, much to the chagrin of my mom (and probably the bride's mom, too - sorry), though I did get one woman from the bride's party tell me I was her "favorite person here."

Besides my footwear, the reception was beautiful, the food delicious, and the bride and groom almost magical.

I finally did get to go to Powell's afterwards, but since Brother S was buying for me I decided not to get much (though he bought me the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo as an early birthday present). We got back to the hotel a little late Saturday night, and I fell asleep quickly, exhausted from the long day.

Sunday was an easy day; we went to church with the bride's family, and they invited us over for a delicious dinner. We played a scrabble-like game called Pick and tried out their XBox Kinect before going back to the hotel to get to bed early. Our Monday flight back to Long Beach left at around 7:00, so we had to wake up by 5:30 just to be there in time.

All in all, I believe, a successful trip, and a wonderful time.

Brother D is the second in our family to get married, after Brother S, who was married about seven years ago. When they were young, Mom always kinda figured that Brother D would be the first to get married in our family, but I guess he took longer to find his perfect girl than Brother S did. I grew up with four older brothers and no sisters, so my brothers getting married has given me the chance to have sisters for the first time. I would consider myself pretty close to Brother S's wife, who has a lot of similar interests as me and is very fun to hang out with and talk to, and I'm looking forward to getting to know Brother's D's new wife as well.