Hands off!

April 5, 2025

Shawn, the girls and the Raven are down south for the day, so we’ll pick up on their story when they come back through on their way home tomorrow. For today Rachael and I have a pretty simple, relaxed agenda. We’ve managed to complete all the business dealings, doctors appointments and the like that have complicated our lives for the last several days and are really just down to packing - and we’ve got three days to do it in so we’re not feeling too stressed. Today’s agenda:

Create GPS Routes for the first regional tour up the coast from Bari to Pescara (Scott)
Load routes to the Garmin (Rachael)
Review and publish the previous post (Rachael)
Develop the next post (Scott)
Pack
Go to CVS to pick up odds and ends (toothpaste, shaving cream, large toenail clippers, etc. (Rachael)
Go to Ace hardware to get miscellaneous screws, bolts and the like to replace the bag of spare parts that got left in Barcelona last fall with the cable lock and pedal spanner. (Scott)
Pick up new IPad cable and charger from the Apple Store (Rachael)
Meet for lunch at Jakes.

Pretty easy living!

By the time Rachael comes around the corner from the bedroom and exposes herself on her way to the loo and the coffee pot, I’m just putting wraps on task #1.

✔️Create GPS routes for the first regional tour up the coast from Bari to Pescara.

Perhaps ten minutes later partner is caffeinated enough so that interactive diologue can begin. The day’s simple agenda is quickly settled, she reminds me that today is Elizabeth’s actual birthday and so I should remind her of it, and then suggests I look out the window.

Not spectacular and the crows have already fanned out across the county, but still worth a look.

And then I start in on packing, a multi-day effort of classifying junk into what goes and stays behind, shuffling between here and storage, identifying anything missing, and then loading up what’s going into their containers. There are lots of ways to approach this, but this morning I start by emptying the contents out of my panniers and dumping them on the floor. When I do, I almost fall on the floor myself and break my nose, I’m so shocked by what’s fallen out. Christmas in April!!

It’s everything that I thought got left behind in Barcelona - Like the missing drivers license and credit card back in San Luis Obispo, I had it all along but just didn’t know it. I sure wish I’d know.n three months ago when at five in the morning I discovered I couldn’t suitcase the bikes for Tucson because I couldn’t remove the pedals from the bikes. What the hell?

✔️Go to Ace hardware to get miscellaneous screws, bolts and the like to replace the bag of spare parts that got left in Barcelona last fall with the cable lock and pedal spanner.

It takes a minute to figure out what’s happened here. When we go down to Tucson we take our smaller red panniers with us that are suitable for day rides, and the large black ones that we need for Europe stay in storage. Also in storage are an older set of panniers that are kept around for spare parts. It looks like I must have screwed up and looked through the older panniers instead of the ones that we came back from Europe with. So of course I didn’t find the spanner.

Amazing, shocking, but of course it’s great news. And it lets me compete two of my tasks for the day before I’ve even headed off to Lovejoy for breakfast and work on the next post since I don’t need to go to Ace Hardware to rebuild a parts bag that was never lost after all. While I’m out Rachael completes her tasks, and after that we’re on our own until we meet for lunch. It’s not long before Rachael steps out the door for her Riverside walk down to Willamette Park and back, with me reminding her that things could be a little crazy down at the waterfront because today’s April 5th, Hands Off! day.

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My plan is to walk down to the waterfront to check out the demonstration to see what sort of crowd turns out. We’ve certainly gotten lucky because the weather is spectacular again today, something that should encourage people to show up.

The event begins at noon, at the Japanese American Historical Plaza on the waterfront, centered on the cherry trees whose blooms have all fallen now but were glorious just last weekend. After that there’s a march of about two miles that starts at 12:30. I’m not planning on joining the march because my knees are too bad at the moment; but I can at least show up to check out the scene and help build a crowd; and I can take the camera and pick up a few shots of Old Town on my way there.

Rip city! Portland brings out its inner Obama.

Don’t look at that DEI stuff, creepy Doge guy; check out that cool bike instead.

As I near the waterfront I start seeing others going my way, their numbers growing as I get closer. It does look like folks are turning out.

In case we don’t see any other birds today, here’s a domestic goose (but I’m not sure eBird would approve, Grampies)!

When I make it to the waterfront though the numbers are stunning. All along the river side of the cherry grove the path is absolutely filled with folks, and there’s a very thin, intermittently appearing and disappearing ribbon strip - maybe half a foot wide? through which two way traffic is trying to thread through the throng. Walkers with their dogs, skate-boarders, folks in wheelchairs, folks like myself walking with a hiking pole that encourages the crowd to step back just a little further to avoid their toes being stabbed. I’d say it takes me fifteen minutes to make it the next three hundred yards until I finally get past the worst of it and the crowd starts thinning out enough for me to reach my goal, the Morrison Bridge where I hope to get an aerial view of the scene.

Depending on where you get your facts and their alternatives, you might know about what’s going on here and elsewhere. Just be assured that we’re into honest reporting though. No biases, no judgments, just fair and balanced all the way. Nothing to see here, comrades.

I finally make it up to the bridge and manage to find a few gaps where I can crowd in close enough to the railing to look over at the scene. And yes, a few folks did show up. Later I’ll look at photos of other scenes around the country and note that the places I feel most connected to in America: Tucson, on the UofA campus; Seattle, at the amphitheater below the Space Needle where Carol Jo and I first saw the jazz group Oregon perform forty years ago; and Minneapolis, where Shawn and his daughters live - they all look just as enormous and colorful and diverse as this vibrant, multiethnic, multigenerational crowd that dwarfs any gathering I remember witnessing or being a part of since probably the Vietnam War era. Regardless of your political perspective it’s impossible to be unmoved by a scene like this.

Depending on where you get your facts and their alternatives, you might know about what’s going on here and elsewhere and have your own thoughts on it. Just be assured that we’re into honest reporting here though. No biases, no judgment, just fair and balanced reporting all the way.

The scene between the cherry trees and the waterfront.

The flip side view: good fences make good neighbors. The blank space in the foreground fronts the march, which will begin in about ten minutes at the line forming on the left.

That’s my hand on the right, helping hang out the wash. The other end is pinned up by a diminutive young woman whose arms were stretched wide enough when I arrived to pull them out of their sockets until I offered to help her out. She’s active duty military and has been coming out here for a few months, wondering when folks would finally show up to join her. Looks like the troops finally arrived.

I think that’s Bruce and Andrea on their belt drive Bike Fridays down there at the bend just before the Steel Bridge.

Look in the back even, at the parking garage across the street.

The warm-up act. They continue more or less nonstop for a half hour at least.

Here comes trouble. Good trouble, some would say.

And then the march moved on, and I walked past Chinatown and met Rachael for lunch.

And then we went home and got on with the packing project.

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Andrea BrownThat march was just what Bruce and I needed. A beautiful day, a lovely stroll with a few clever and determined friends and neighbors, it was an amazing and uplifting scene. Back home in our neighborhood, we kept seeing people returning home with signs for a few hours.
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1 week ago

Kathleen JonesGreat photos of the Portland gathering. Thanks for those.

We had hundreds of people lining Hwy 1 all through Half Moon Bay, which is saying something. I would say about 1/3-1/2 of the Teslas honked encouragement.
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1 week ago