Today we awoke early and made our way up through the Saanich Peninsula to Sidney. Neither of us was very hungry so we both had a small breakfast at 3rd Street Cafe. Although I didn’t eat much, I made sure that I grabbed some of their homemade mango habanero hot sauce for my eggs.
After breakfast we drove the short distance to the ferry terminal and before long were boarding the ferry. We had planned on staying in the car for the duration of the crossing but decided against it after a nearby truck’s alarm decided to continually sound. We had a fairly uneventful crossing – other than the truck alarm – and before we knew it, we were heading down the highway towards the border.
We spent about 20 to 30 minutes waiting to get up to the CBP officer – chatting about this and that while we waited. We told him that we were going on a two-week trip to visit different restaurants that have been featured on the Food Network – in previous years I have said we were on a Food Network Tour which usually required me explaining that we weren’t being “employed” by the Food Network but just going for fun. The CBP officer asked not only to see my hotel reservations (nicely stored in my Booking.com app), but also wanted some name of the restaurants that we had visited on prior trips. One such restaurant – Fire on the Mountain Wings – he had heard of and also asked if they had some kind of hot wings or something. I replied that they had El Jefe sauce which was 250,000 Scoville units. He then pulled out his mace to compare the Scoville units and I found out that they now carry spray that is almost as hot as pure capsaicin – 16,000,000 units. Good to know ;). He wished us a good day and sent us on our way.
This was the first year I have been able to get a good picture of the weird sculpture that is by the US side of the border – I have no idea what it is supposed to be, but Mum and I have always thought it looked neat.
We then headed south on I-5 and made it as far as Mount Vernon/Burlington area before we hit traffic. We had 375 km/235mi still to go by this point and neither of us was very impressed. After fighting a ridiculous amount of traffic through Skagit County, Lynnwood, all of I-405 around Seattle and along through Tacoma, we finally got to Portland. Five and a half hours later.
For the first time on any of our trips, getting into Portland and our hotel was the easiest part of the day. We then took a quick rest at the hotel before walking a couple of blocks to Red Robin. I started with pretzel bites and Mum had the artichoke and spinach dip – I tried some of her dip and can now say I’ve tried artichokes. For an entree I had the smoke and pepper burger and Mum had the Ensenada chicken platter. All in all a pretty good meal for a chain restaurant.
After dinner we walked back to the hotel, watched part of a Chopped episode and then did our Wikipedia and IMDB research of the day. Not long afterwards, Mum headed to bed and I sat down to write my blog.
It is now my turn to roll over and go to bed. Tomorrow we will be exploring Portland but our exact itinerary is up in the air still.
Thank you for reading and I will talk to you soon.
L