Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay) to Fairbanks

Prudhoe Bay really wasn’t set up for heavy tourism. They tolerated tourists – most of which come up on large luxury buses from the cruise lines. The buses leave the tourists at the hotels – of which there are only two – and they fly out on scheduled airline flights the next day – to continue on their merry touring way. The hotels are not exactly the first class places a lot of people are used to.

This was the larger of the two, and the fanciest – ‘fancy’ being a relative term in Alaska.

We were camped in the parking lot in front of this hotel across from the airport. We got their permission to stay there in our RV for a couple days.

We had expected to see other RVs parked in the lot with us, but there was only a pick-up camper. Apparently, not too many people actually drove all the way up there. The lady manning the desk inside the airport/hotel warned us to ALWAYS look around outside our RV out the windows before stepping outside, as there were bears routinely prowling the area. In fact, there was a mother with two cubs that lived under part of the hotel building. The airport runway was huge and it handled both scheduled airlines and big cargo planes associated with the oil companies.

Paul got out his bucket and cleaning brushes and found some water nearby. He needed to clean off our RV enough so we could respectably live in the parking lot for a couple days and have the luxury of seeing out our windows. Here is our rig when we first pulled in.

Here our rig after Paul cleaned it up a little.

Ta-da!! Much better now. RV windows cleaned and cab area of truck washed off. The most important parts.

We asked at the hotel about how to drive to the Arctic Ocean. We were informed that there was no civilian access to the ocean. What!!?? We had our heart set on wading in the Arctic ocean!! The lady said we could schedule a special tour for $25.00 each that would take us in the hotel shuttle bus, accompanied by a guide, to the ocean for a few minutes. The hotel had permission from the oil companies to drive across their property to the edge of the ocean. We paid our $50.00 and said we’d come back later for the tour.

Our tour bus driver/guide was a knowledgeable young fellow and was very entertaining. As we drove to the ocean, he told us all about Prudhoe Bay and the oil fields and what life was like for the people who live up there. When he wasn’t driving tourists to the ocean, he’s was a general maintenance man for the hotel. The oil companies owned the hotel. He worked 12 weeks straight, 7 days per week, 12 hours per day, then got 6 weeks off. The oil company flew him home and back (Georgia was his home) for his 6 weeks, and they paid him $20.00 per hour and provided his housing and food. He figured if he did that for 3 more years, he would have enough money saved to pay for his college education and living expenses all the way through graduate school.

When we got to the ocean, we took off our shoes, rolled up our jeans, and waded into the icy cold ocean water while our guide took photos.

Like a couple of little kids, we picked up some pretty stones as souvenirs, and were as happy as we could be. We went back to the hotel and our RV.

The next order of business was to go over to the welding area and see if somebody there could patch up our trailer frame. They had us back our rig into their shop area so they could take a look at what needed to be done.

Paul put on his overalls and crawled under the RV with the welding guys. He peeled the duct tape off of the holes and while doing so, they all noticed that both of the rear shocks had also been torn off along the way and now they were completely gone leaving more holes. Our frame was looking like swiss cheese. Not good.

They agreed to weld plates over all the holes which would do double-duty in also reinforcing the frame. They wire-brushed off the brackets supporting the springs and found that those had large cracks. They said we probably wouldn’t have gone another hundred miles without those breaking and our frame falling apart. They said they could fix that, too. I was thinking that this was sounding like it would cost us upwards of a thousand dollars or more to have these repairs done by professional oil company welders. They spent almost 3 hours making the repairs and reinforcing the whole underbody of our RV home.

When they got done and we asked them how much we owed them, they wouldn’t take ANY MONEY!!! They said some fresh cookies would be nice. So we went over to the hotel and bought some fancy, homemade cookies from the Princess Cruise caterers and took them back to the welders. They wished us well on the rest of our adventures and we thanked them again heartily.

We were impressed at how clean everything was in Prudhoe Bay. There were no iridescent oil films on any of the standing water around all their buildings and equipment. The ponds had loons, beautiful white swans, snow geese, and other waterfowl swimming all around the buildings, pipes, and equipment. We saw caribou and moose, and there were barren ground grizzly bears living at the hotel. No one bothered them or chased them away or disturbed them in the least. They just told everyone to watch out for them and stay out of their way.

The air was crystal clear and there were no noxious oil field smells like out in West Texas. There were no stacks burning off excess natural gas like in most oil fields. They injected the excess natural gas back into the ground where it came from.

We saw these interesting trailer buildings on skids parked around. They are research laboratories for University arctic research and oil company scientists that get towed out onto the ice or across the tundra in winter for the scientists to do research. There were dorm rooms, lab buildings, kitchen and cafeteria buildings, recreation buildings, laundry buildings, maintenance buildings, and the like. ‘Whole portable cities in long trains!

These were some of the vehicles they used to tow the building trains. They could stay out for weeks at a time.

Here is a photo of some of the dormitories that the oil workers lived in when they were up working at the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. They had barred cages on each end so workers could step out and look around for polar bears when they needed to leave the dorms. When people first started working up there in the 1960s and 1970s, the polar bears would hang around the doors to the dorms and wait for people to step out, then attack them. The dorms looked like giant meal dispensers to the bears. The people up there still had to be extremely careful about polar bears in the winters. They were very aggressive and always hungry.

Our guide related a story about a worker who was once living in one of the dorms on the ground floor. The guy looked out his window and saw a large polar bear outside looking in at him. He tapped on the window to see what the bear would do, and it lunged right through the glass and grabbed him by the arm and tried to drag him outside through the broken window. He was screaming like crazy and his roommate grabbed a .357 Magnum he had in the room, and shot the bear in the head, killing him and saving his friend’s life. Unfortunately, it is against the oil company’s rules to have a firearm anywhere on company property, so the guy who shot the bear was fired and put on a plane back to his home the very next day. The injured guy was treated at the company hospital, fired, and sent home for being so recklessly stupid. Yes, they actually had a staffed hospital in Prudhoe Bay with a surgeon, internist, and nurses.

Paul remarked that he grew up being warned to look both ways before crossing a street, but no one ever had to warn him about stepping out of his house and getting eaten by a polar bear.

We left Prudhoe Bay to head back down to Fairbanks about 4 PM in the afternoon. Since it never got dark up there that time of year, it really didn’t matter. Here are some signs we saw while leaving the town.

We got back to Galbraith Lake where we decided to spend the night again on our way back down the Haul Road. This time we took a closer look at the little airport building located on the edge of the parking lot.

We noticed that it was also an Arctic National Wildlife Refuge cabin. The sign said the public was welcome to use it in case of an emergency. It was unlocked and had emergency equipment and airport equipment inside of it. Amazing! Where in the lower 48 could you have such a thing, just sitting unlocked with no personnel around all the time, and not have it ripped off or vandalized!!

It wasn’t raining this time and we made excellent progress – traveling about 35-40 mph in bright sunshine and on dry roads. We had again passed Masatoshi pulling his little Caribou Express cart along the road about 12 miles from where we last saw him. He told us he was going slowly because he was stopping to fish in lakes and streams. He was catching arctic char, grayling, and lake trout. We asked if he needed anything, filled up his water bottles, and wished him well on the rest of his journey.

This time when we drove over the Brooks Range, the sun was mostly out and we could see all over the top of the world. We crossed the Atigun Pass and even saw a mountain sheep right next to the road.

Here is a photo of the mountain sheep. He looked very ratty as he was losing his old coat and growing out a new one for the next winter – which up there can begin in August.

We stopped for lunch along the South Fork of the Koyukuk River so Paul could pan for gold. The exact location was noted in our gold panning book as a primo and open area to pan for gold. Paul went down to the river with his gold pan, his super-insulated panning gloves, a bucket, a shovel, mosquito head net, and a can of bear spray. I stayed in the RV to write in my journal for a while and fix us some lunch.

Paul looked pretty darn cute in his plaid shirt, the red suspenders he had found at Big Rays in Fairbanks, and his jeans. After a while, he came back to the RV to get a jar to put his gold dust into (remember collecting fireflies on a summer’s night?) so his panning was a success. We finish our lunch as he tapped on the jar while holding it close to the window in the sunlight, admiring the glittering gold flecks mixed in with the black sand . “It sure looks like gold to me, Joanie. What do you think?”

“It looks like gold to me, too, Honey. ‘Another 14 or 15 pounds of it and maybe we can pay for this whole trip. I love you, Babes!”

Now we need to continue on to Fairbanks. Its July 1st and half our summer adventure is over. I hear there is lots more gold in the Yukon, too, and we need to get on over there to look for it.

Pingos and Polygons

Pingos are yurt-shaped hills that form in the arctic tundra when underground springs freeze on top of the permafrost but underneath the tundra layer. As the water from the spring accumulates and freezes, it can’t swell downwards because of the permafrost, so it expands upwards, pushing the tundra up into mounds that look like yurts. They can be anywhere from 10 to 180 feet high and add an interesting visual dimension to the flat arctic tundra.

Polygons occur where the ground ice in the tundra forms a honeycomb network. The center sinks slightly leaving a very visible network of polygon-shaped formations that connect together just like a honeycomb. They are best seen from the air. We saw both of these formations but only have photos of pingos.

We had driven 160 miles in one day. That may not sound like much, but they were a hard 160 miles. We made it all the way across the Brooks Range, over the Atigan Pass at 4800 foot, the Continental Divide and down onto the beginning of the arctic tundra. This Continental Divide, through the center of the Brooks Range, is the point where all the rivers north of it flow to the Arctic Ocean, and all the rivers south of it flow to the Bering Sea or the Pacific Ocean. It was raining too hard to get any photos going through the Brooks Range but we will have another opportunity for pictures on our way back down the Haul Road.

Just before we entered the Brooks range mountains, we passed the famous “Northernmost Tree on the Alaska Pipeline” – a small spruce tree that was the last one growing on the edge of the arctic treeline. While stopped at this last tree, a guy on a motorcycle stopped and asked us if we would take his photo by the tree. This poor fellow was inching his way up the deep muddy road hoping to not get plowed over by a speeding semi-sized pipeline truck. He had ridden his cycle all they way from Maryland.

Coming down the north side of the Brooks Range and out onto the flat, tundra plain to the Arctic Ocean, we had entered what is called the North Slope.

This county-level political subdivision (95,000 sq. miles) is larger than the entire state of Utah. Only 7,300 people lived in the North Slope in 1998 making it a great place to live if you don’t like neighbors. The median income per household was $63,000, which was a nice piece of change back then. The money was all a result of the oil industry, but 31% of those homes still didn’t have any plumbing. It would be hard to have such a thing in an igloo in a village out on the ice or tundra.

We stopped for the night at an “unimproved campground” (Is there any other kind up there??) at a pipeline landing strip called Galbraith Lake. It was about a five mile long drive down a winding one-lane dirt road elevated about 10 feet above the tundra surface. God help you if you got out of the two-track ruts or you’d fall into the tundra and be there forever. Once headed down the road, there was no turning back until you got to the airport parking lot.

It is hard to tell from this photo, but this was a functioning airport regularly used by pipeline personnel and it even had a little airport building and a large parking lot where people could camp. We parked for the night noticing that there were other adventurers set up as well.

Here you can see our rig on the right and a large, converted red and white bus in the background. The bus was called the Wandering Star, and it was driven by a couple from the Black Hills in South Dakota that were active wildlife photographers and adventurers. They became good friends through a freaky set of circumstances with a reconnection down in southern Arizona a couple years later. The other vehicle was a used Mercedes Off-Road firetruck from Germany, which its owners had converted into an indestructible off-road camper in order to tour places like the Arctic and the outback of Australia.

Before we could take in the scenery, Paul had to get buckets of water out of nearby puddles and wash enough of the mud off of the windows so we could see out from the inside.

As you can see from here, it was impossible to see out of the windows after a day on the muddy roads.

This is what the back of our rig looked like as we started up the Brooks Range. The sides looked the same. Windex and a few paper towels wouldn’t even make a dent in this stuff. We used buckets of ditch water or stream water and a scrub brush on a collapsible pole.

While camped the night before, we read a copy of the Fairbanks paper we had along with us. In it was a story about a Japanese mountain climber, Masatoshi Kuriaki, who was the first person to ever solo-climb Mt. McKinley (Denali) in the winter. He accomplished this amazing fete on March 8 of 1998. He had also soloed Mt. Everest and a host of other famous peaks in his young career. The article went on to say that he was now on a trek to walk all the way from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay. According to his time frame, which was trekking 10 miles per day, we should encounter him sometime that day. And, guess what? We did!!!

He was just off the road about to break his camp, when we spotted him. We stopped and waved at him and grabbed our camera and the article about him, when he waved back. He was pulling all his gear in a garden cart named the Cariboo Express. We hiked over to his little camp. I was babbling “domo arigato” to him – the only Japanese words I knew besides “sayonara” and “sushi.” At least I didn’t call him Mr. Roboto. He said he spoke little English, and I showed him the article we had from the Fairbanks newspaper. He autographed it for us and said he was excited that we knew who he was.

We told him that our Portland, Oregon son, David, and daughter-in-law, Nathalie, had climbed to Mt. Everest base camp without sherpas, and also hiked the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, as well. He was impressed with their accomplishment. A fellow Japanese man who was a wildlife photographer, stopped to say hello to Masatoshi and he took all our photos.

We asked him if he needed any food or anything else, and he said he was basically eating Ramen noodles and fish he caught along the way every evening. I went into our RV and got him some fresh vegetables and some pork for a stir-fry for his dinner later that night. He was hauling all of his camping gear in a garden cart which he called his “Japanese Caribou Express.” Note also in this photo, he is making this trek in sandals!!

What a fantastic guy, he was! When we were in Denali National Park a couple weeks before, we
had heard from the park rangers about a great Japanese hero who had solo-climbed Denali last winter. Who knew we’d actually meet up with him along our travels? We wished him luck along the rest of his trip and told him we would look for him on our way back down the road.

We passed a Princess Cruise bus parked along the road around lunch time. The cruise employees had set out giant coolers full of sandwiches and drinks and all kinds of other good things for the passenger’s lunch. We stopped to get some lunch of our own when they invited us to help ourselves to some of their food. Well, yes we will, thank you very much! We were sad that Masatoshi wasn’t coming along about then. What a feast he would have had after nothing but Ramen noodles and fish for the last 400 miles!!

Further up the road, more toward evening outside of Prudhoe bay, we encountered some large herds of caribou along the road and grazing underneath the pipeline, which parallels the Haul Road. At one point, we were driving very slowly along with a herd of caribou just strolling down the road ahead and behind us.

The pipeline people were also very protective of the wildlife in the arctic. Even the demon pipeline trucks speeding up and down the roads would slow down for wildlife. There were places all along the pipeline ,where when they built it, the either elevated it an extra amount or buried areas along known wildlife migration routes so as not to impede herd migration.

We so enjoyed seeing these beautiful animals so close in the wild.

The pipeline was actually high enough that the caribou could walk right underneath it anywhere, and they lounged in the shade of it during the hot afternoon sun. We were hoping to spot some musk oxen, but we didn’t see any in the wild on this trip. We saw many Arctic Terns, and some huge geese which we didn’t recognize. There were tons of ducks of various species and as we ate lunch in our RV, two giant birds were doing some kind of little dance on our roof.

The next post will include our experiences in the town of Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay).

Waiting Area Misery

The following is a rant.

Modern day office waiting areas – doctors, dentists, hospitals, banks, airports, etc. now share the annoying feature of a blaring, large-screen television mounted on the wall of their waiting areas. While waiting to be called in, you are a forced captive to whatever TV show the office staff has tuned in. It is always ten times too loud, and tuned to some show you hate.

Case in point. I went into my hospital this morning for a CT scan. The waiting area is huge so I tried to choose a seat as far away from the giant TV as I could. I headed for the very back of the room, and guess what? There was another TV mounted on the wall for the enjoyment of the people waiting in the back of the room! It was just as loud as the one in the front. The people in the waiting area were all staring at these TVs like a bunch of sheep.

Oh, please call me back soon, I silently prayed. Fortunately, they called me quickly, and led me back to a secondary waiting area near where the CT scanners were located. Oh, NO!! There were TVs mounted down the hall on the way to this new area, and another on the wall of the secondary area. I lost it.

“Would you PLEASE turn off this TV? I can’t stand it. Why do you think your patients can’t spend a few minutes of peace and quiet with their own thoughts? I don’t know how you people get any work done around here with these TVs blasting you all day. I would not be able to tolerate working in an environment like this.”

She said she would do that, and went up to some magic, hidden switch on the wall, and turned it off. I sighed with relief and sat down and pulled out my book. The other TVs in most waiting areas I’ve been in are mounted up high such that people can’t reach them to make any kind of adjustments in stations or volume. Either that, or they have a big sign warning people NOT to touch the set.

I tried getting one of those ‘universal remotes’ that would control any TV off the internet. Ah ha! I would just adjust the volume ,or whatever, of those annoying sets surreptitiously from my seat. This was a perfect solution. However, when it arrived in the mail, it became clear that you needed a tech degree from MIT, or someplace, to operate it. You first needed to program into it EXACTLY what brand AND model of TV you wanted to remotely control, along with a bunch of other specifications. There were several other steps that had to be performed before it would operate the offending TV remotely. Jeez-o-petes! That was not going to work. You can’t possibly get all that info from looking at the front of a TV set.

I asked a clinic manager in one of my doctor’s offices why they felt they needed to provide these TVs for their patients. She explained that the patients demanded it. Really? Demanded it? I now express my dismay over this horrible sound pollution directly to my doctors when I finally get in to see them. I patiently explain that there ought to be a separate area a person can sit and be free of this noise. It should be recognized as being as bad for your hearing and brain as second-hand tobacco smoke is for your health.

The other ironic thing is that many of these places have signs up telling people they must turn off their cell phones so they don’t disturb other people. You’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me!!!! My cell phone is going to disturb someone whose hearing is being actively destroyed by a blasting TV?? I couldn’t even hear it ring, and having a conversation on the phone amongst all that racket, would be impossible.

There didn’t used to be TVs everywhere you went. They have cropped up like poisonous weeds, and spread just as fast. At one of the Albertson’s grocery stores in Gresham, Oregon, Paul and I went in one day to find TVs at EACH check-out lane! They were tuned to a station called “Check-Out TV.” They were just a continuous stream of ads urging you to buy more stuff. We asked to see the store manager and told him that we would no longer shop at their store as long as they had those annoying ad machines blasting away at us while we unloaded our groceries onto the belt. He said they were a test store for them. We said we wouldn’t be back as long as they were there. Sometimes you just have to vote with your business.

I’ve gotten used to the background music that you hear all the time in the supermarkets. Studies have been done that show that customers are happier and buy more products when they have up-beat music playing in the background. The songs are mostly oldies. I still don’t get how listening to Prince’s old 1980s song “Raspberry Beret” makes me want to buy more food? Nor does hearing “Un-break My Heart” make me want to put everything back and leave. Clearly, word content doesn’t matter as much as catchiness.

Maybe it is just me, but others I talk to agree that they would rather have it quiet in their doctor’s office, so they could just read a book or check their email or their Facebook page on their iPad or smartphone. I am hoping that if enough people voice their complaints about this racket everywhere you go these days, it may change. It seems we should be as entitled to a quiet environment the same as we are entitled to have smoke-free air to breathe. As it is now, people like me don’t have any choice but to be subjected to TV noise pollution at every turn.

Anybody else notice this?

Warning! Adult-Oriented Blog Post

There is an upscale, hip shopping area in North Portland called the Historic Mississippi District. It is several blocks long and both sides of the street are lined with small, boutique-style shops selling everything from jewelry, to shoes, to clothing, to artisan food, to wines to…well…most anything that you really didn’t know you needed or wanted. Very cool art and music and novelties you won’t find anywhere else.

Just around the corner off N. Mississippi on Beech Street lives a small, discreet boutique called She Bop.

Just another trendy, urban Portland boutique, right? Not exactly.

If you are offended by frank, open discussions regarding human sexuality, then read no further, as I will describe this unique little store and its mission and products. Consider yourself warned.

She Bop calls itself “a female-friendly sex toy boutique.” They are not female only – just female-friendly. Unlike the sleazy truck stop adult shops carrying cheap sleazy items and books, She Bop carries high-quality, eco-friendly products made from sustainable materials. This is very important to Portland people. Who wants one of those cheap, plastic toys loaded with toxic BPA and God-knows what else, made by enslaved Chinese children, that you can’t even recycle? She Bop’s mission is to “offer a fun, safe, comfortable, sex-positive environment for their customers with an emphasis on sex education and the acceptance of enjoyable, healthy human sexuality as a factor of everyday life.” All manner of permutations and combinations of people are welcome here.

The name, She Bop, was inspired by the 1980s Cyndi Lauper song of the same name which celebrated the ideal of sexual freedom and empowerment. She Bop is a locally-owned, one-of-a-kind store that maintains an interesting website with information about their store, their philosophy, and about how you can order products for online purchase: sheboptheshop.com.

Walking in the door, you are greeted by a myriad of displays of brightly-colored sex toys representing assorted parts of both male and female anatomy. Oh, my word! Many of them come in a selection of colors so you can pick your favorite. I especially liked the purple and hot pink ones. One section is lined with book shelves stocked with informative and educational texts and fantasy fiction for any tastes. I was drawn to one of the books called “The Adventurous Couples Guide to Sex Toys” written by Violet Blue. This looked like a good place to start, as there were many curious products displayed that I had no idea what a person or persons might use for.

After getting over the initial shock of this provocative shop, I noticed that it was buzzing with customers who seemed not the least bit shy or embarrassed at being there. There were several couples of different persuasions browsing the merchandise, some groups of women, some male couples, etc. – mostly in the age range of 25-50. No one seemed uncomfortable or embarrassed – most looked positively joyous. I didn’t see any old men in long raincoats. I was, by far, the oldest person in the store at almost 68, and I felt kind of like an oddity, until I realized that the store was full of odd people. After a few minutes in there, with no one giggling or giving me strange looks, I began to relax.

The androgynous sales clerks were like none I had ever encountered in any store. These were the owners and clerks with graduate degrees in English (specialty in Chaucer), Psychology and Gender Studies, Women’s Studies, Philosophy, Wildlife Studies (hahaha), and four of them are active writers and bloggers for a variety of publications – most all from Lewis & Clark College – one of the world’s premier private liberal arts colleges. The person who patiently waited on me was named Wyatt Riot. I didn’t know if he or she was a man or a woman and it really didn’t matter. I also spoke with a person named Amory Jane.

These sales clerks were extremely skilled at getting people to feel comfortable asking questions about the various products on display, making recommendations for things one might like to try (but NOT in the store), demonstrating how to turn them off and on and adjust the various speeds (not intended as a double entendre), and generally explaining anything you might want to know more about. After a while, I found I could easily talk to Wyatt Riot about things I would NEVER discuss with my doctor.

“So, Wyatt, now where exactly did you say I could put this one???” “Is it safe to use this in a hot tub?” “Do you have a list of states that have felony laws against these kind of items?” (I’ve read that many states have such laws. You can readily buy a gun to kill people, put owning a sex toy is a criminal offense. Go figure.) “Is Arizona on any of your lists?”

Believing that honesty is the best policy, I confessed to Wyatt that I was a blogger and was intending to write about this unique store. I felt I owed them an explanation for coming back to the store twice in one day to talk with them. I didn’t want them to think I was some crazy stalker. Wyatt said they would love to see my post when I finished it, and seemed genuinely excited about me writing about their fun store. I promised I would forward my link.

Needless to say, I had many, many questions that I asked, and many, many more that occurred to me even after reading the guide to sex toys. Shifting further into interview mode, I asked if their business had picked up substantially after the book “50 Shades of Gray” came out, and they answered that they were very busy all the time and didn’t notice a huge uptick resulting from the book being published. I did not take a lot of photos around this store as I didn’t feel I could post them on my blog anyway, without getting thrown off the internet.

I did take a photo of one product that can probably safely be presented here. It was an exceptionally curious item shaped like a shiny red pyramid.

I still can’t for the life of me understand how sitting on this device would do anything other than rupture a hemorrhoid. It contains a powerful vibrator that is supposed to make all kinds of everyday activities much more pleasurable – like reading, or doing your hair. It had a dent in the top of the display model caused by a customer ignoring the warning about not turning it on while it was sitting on the display table, and it went skittering off onto the floor denting its pointy ‘business end’ top and sending silicon dildos flying in all directions. I was wondering if this cone could be attached to the top of a Roomba, making vacuuming more exciting and interactive??? The short answer was “no.”

Wyatt was very patient with my questions and explained that their store had a whole list of classes and workshops that people could sign up for that would address any questions and explorations regarding Human Sexuality. I got a class list of their upcoming events and I marveled at how you could possibly present classes on many of these subjects? Was there a lab component involved? Wyatt recommended one entitled “The Joys of Toys 101” which he/she said would explain all the workings of their various products and how to use them. Unfortunately, these classes fill up super fast and they were already filled clear into February – long after I would be back in Arizona. Too bad, but there is always next summer when we will be back in Portland, and maybe by then I can interest my husband in this class? That way, I’d have somebody to study with?

If you are visiting Portland, you MUST see this store. You’d be surprised how quickly your initial shock and self-consciousness will turn to curiosity and delight. I just hope none of my purchases starts buzzing in my carry-on when I go through airport security on my way back to Arizona. Just kidding.