Track and Quality Beer — My Perfect Vacation

Oh my GOD I just had one of the greatest vacations of my life.

First off, I went to Eugene, Oregon — aka "Track Town USA" — for the United States Olympic Track & Field Trials. As those of you know me well are all too aware, I am a rabid fan of track & field (or "athletics," as it's known in the rest of the world). That might seem strange to you, as there aren't too many of us track geeks, but my love of the sport was burned into my soul back in high school, when I finally discovered that long-distance running was the one sport at which my then-skinny ass did not suck. After years of being that kid who always got picked last when choosing teams, I suddenly became an athlete, and to this day, 22 years later, I am still the Rockdale High School record holder in the one- and two-mile runs. (Yes, I know, you're very impressed.) I went on to a brief and undistinguished career with the University of Texas Longhorns, where I set the school record in the 9,600 meter run (that's a joke, which Bret – my former teammate who accompanied on this trip — will be happy to tell you about).

So I'm still a huge fan, and if I had done nothing but watch eight days of the nation's best track & field athletes compete to make the U.S. team for the Beijing Olympics, I would have been blissed out. But it was so much more than that, thanks in no small part to my loving and scheming wife. (More on her later.)

To start with — and here's the part you care about — this was in Oregon. And Oregon is synonymous with beer. Good beer. And the track meet was no exception. Yes sir, the organizers at the University of Oregon knew there would be hell to pay if they pulled a German World Cup and limited the crowd to McDonald's and Budweiser. They supplied some decent food, good coffee, and a beer selection that included Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen and Drop-Top Amber. Track and a generously hoppy brew? Sweet.

(Okay, I know you don't care so much about the track, but I have to rave about it at least briefly. Skip to the next paragraph if you just don't care.) I got to see three American reccords — in the men's 100 meters, the women's 3,000 meter steeplechase, and women's pole vault! Plus two national high school records! And most exciting, I got to see Tyson Gay (that's him signing autographs in the photo) run the fastest time ever recorded by a human being in the 100 meters — 9.68 seconds, wow — but it didn't count as a world record because there was too much of a tailwind. Still, record or not, it gave me goosebumps. And really making me happy, six former Longhorns made the team. And it all happened at Hayward Field, one of the most revered track stadiums in America.

The party of course, continued away from Hayward Field. Eugene may be a tiny college town, but it has its share of good breweries and bars. The ones I enjoyed the most (and recommend):

McMenamin's East 19th Street Cafe, part of that cool chain of Oregon brewpubs. Decent food, quality brews. Just two blocks south of the stadium.

Villard Street Pub, three blocks east of the stadium, and the party place for the trials. Pretty much every athlete (except the ultra-religious ones, I suppose) showed his or her face there once their event was done. I swear, you've never seen a bar with so many incredibly fit patrons. Villard Street was hosting a microbrew and wine festival simultaneous to the trials, and the highlight for us was that it featured several beers by …

Eugene City Brewery, a Rogue-owned bar that makes — oh this made me happy — Track Town Ales. Seriously. Dig the logo with the track spike. The lineup includes 100 Meter Ale, 200 Meter Ale (this was an IPA that became the favorite of me and my track geek friends), and Triple Jump Ale.

And the kicker was Track Town Pizza, featuring decent pizza (click on the link and get a laugh out of the menu), a fine beer selection (shouldn't every college student be able to have an IPA with his pizza?), and a wall adorned with historic pictures of famous track & field stars. It was like my personal room in heaven. (See photo of me and the other track geeks at TTP below.)


So that would have been enough to bliss me out. But it gets better.

There were two rest days in the middle of all this, so Bret and I headed up I-5 to Portland to spend them with our buddy Bill and his family. I've raved before about what an unbelievably insane beer scene Portland has. In fact, I did a three-part series on it, the highlight of which was Bill leading me, Todd, and a neighbor on a bicycling tour of Portland's brew pubs. (See part two of that series.) Just getting to see the Bill Family would have been enough of a bliss-out.

But wait, it gets even better – Mags (that's the aforementioned wife), wanting to make this a big 40th birthday event, flew up from her family visit to Kansas City, accompanied by our friends the Jaurigue family. Okay, so that would have been enough bliss.

But wait — does this sound like one of those old Ginsu knife commercials? — it got even better. No less than Todd himself, my best friend since high school and former Portlander, secretly flew in from Cleveland and surprised me!!! That was arranged by the wife. Honey, that was one hell of a present. I love you.

So of course, having Bill, Bret, Mags, Todd and me together led to the inevitable combo beer tasting/poker game. Then, the next day, we (minus the wife, who had to get back to KC, but with the addition of Erik, another Portland friend/track geek I know) did a reprisal of the bicycling brewpub tour, and it was just as wonderful as the original. Thankfully, since this post is already way too long, I can just send you over to Bill's recounting of it.

I spent way too much money, but since my 40th is coming up in August, I did so with the wife's blessing (and help, thanks again), and had more fun that I thought possible. I'm pretty sure I've never had that much fun for 10 consecutive days. And believe me, I haven't even scratched the surface of everything I could say about the trip. I could prattle on about it forever.

Buy me a beer the next time you see me and I probably will.

Portland, part 3 of 3

I don't think this NaBloPoMo exercise is having the intended effect. Gawd, I'm sick of blogging now. But dammit, except for Thanksgiving Day, I've made it this far, so I might as well slog on. Plus, it will finally force me to finish my Portland stories. Long, long after I should have. I'll touch on just three highlights: A non-brewpub, and some cool places I found outside of Portland.

The non-brewpub was a really weird little place. It was called La Bodega, not far from Todd's house – walking distance, almost – and not to be confused with the Austin La Bodega, a salsa-dance bar. This place was ostensibly a bar, but yet it wasn't. It was more like a beer boutique. The waiter/bartender gave very personal service, bringing out whichever bottle of fancy-pants beer you desired – and they had the fanciest – and people relaxed around couches in the dimly lit place. No loud music, no big crowds. It almost had the feel of a coffeehouse. I expected a poetry reading to break out. Perhaps a wine tasting room is a good analogy. Good beer, but I wasn't quite certain what to make of the place.

On another day, we drove up Mt. Hood. Yes, there was snow up on the mountain, even in mid-summer. We wanted to take the kids on a ride up the ski lift, but alas! – the lift closed about 30 minutes before we arrived. I wasn't sure how to console the kids – predictably, the older girl started going into meltdown mode (she is only in the last few weeks learning how to cope with disappointment, and still hasn't perfected the skill) – but I darn sure knew how to console myself. With a beer. And yes, Oregon even has brewpubs on its mountains. About halfway back down, we pulled into the Ice Axe Grill in Government Camp. They call themselves "the brewery with altitude," har, har. Once again, my procrastination is making it hard for me to remember what I had, but I remember liking it. Problem is, one beer was just okay, and the other was great, and I can't remember which was which. But I'm pretty sure I had the Hogsback Oatmeal Stout and the Ice Axe India Pale Ale. One of them was cask-conditioned – I want to say the IPA. Definitely stop in if you visit Mount Hood, which you should.

But possibly the most magnificent day of our trip – even edging out Bill's bicycling tour of Portland's brewpubs and the Oregon Brewers Festival, but only barely – was our trip to the coast. The Pacific coast is just godawful beautiful, mountains just shooting straight up out of the ocean. At Pacific City, the big girl and I climbed the biggest sand dune I've ever seen, I jumped in frigid water that made Barton Springs seem toasty, and we all marveled over a multitude of sea life stuck to the rocks, various anemones and starfish that were just fascinating.

And once it was over, we walked over to the Pelican Pub & Brewery (pictured above) for their wonderful beer and magnificent, very fresh seafood. I had some fried oysters that were as big as my head and tasted divine. I've never seen oysters like this. I didn't even know nature made them that big. Jeez, I have no idea what I drank now – either the IPA or the Scottish ale, or maybe both. And I took home a bottle of the 2005 Bridal Ale, a "French country ale," I guess a take on the Belgian saison. Bill and I killed it off the next night back at his house. I left the coast with a warm glow (despite the chilly Northwestern air), filled with good beer, hot seafood, and a great memory of time well spent with my kids. Watching the sun go down into the Pacific is a rare treat.

There is more I could tell of Portland – I can think now of at several worthy places and beers I haven't mentioned: Roots, or the Lucky Labrador (a bar where you can take your dog, and man, their IPAs – they had more than one – and barleywine were stunning), or John's Marketplace, the most magnificent beer store I've seen in my life in one place (more than 800 beers!). Seriously, John's made Grape Vine Market and Spec's look like chumps. But I'm just getting too removed from it all now. The memory's getting foggy, and I'm moving on to new adventures. If you want tales of Portland, you should buy some plane tickets and go create your own. I hope you had as much fun as I did. Thanks to my good friends who made what would have been a good trip anyway into a magnificent one.

Portland Recap, Chapter 2

Okay, by god, time for me to finally make some progress on recounting my magnificent Portland vacation back in July-August. (Part 1 was here.)

So back when Bill and I lived together here in Austin, it was he who got me into bicycling. Having grown up in a small town, where a car is a matter survival, I couldn't imagine actually getting around a big city on human power. Sure, I was a good environmentalist, but to me, alternative transportation meant taking the bus. And I'm still a mass-transit believer, but he showed me that, with a little practice, you can get around a city just fine on a bike.

And that's especially true in Portland. God bless Austin, it's trying to be bike-friendly, but it's still a good decade behind Portland. Getting around that city is so easy that, by god, you can even do it when you've been drinking beer — as Bill was determined to prove. (My joke about Portland: You can't swing a dead cat in that town without knocking someone off their bicycle, and you can't swing a dead bicyclist without knocking a microbrew out of someone's hand.) He hopped on his bike, he loaned one out to me, and Todd and Bill's next-door neighbor hopped on theirs, and we set off on the Bicycling Tour of Portland's Brewpubs (not an official event — I just like the way it looks in all caps).

We headed off a surprisingly easy two miles east to the McCormick & Schmick's Seafood Restaurant that sits on the lovely Willamette River, just a little ways down from the park where we had enjoyed the Oregon Brewers Festival the day before. No, M&S is not a brewpub, but apparently they've worked out some kind of a deal with Full Sail, and so we settled into a tasty plate of calamari and I think I had a cask-conditioned IPA in front of me. A rare treat in Austin, cask-conditioned ales are de rigeur in Portland – I think every place I went had one. Now that's some full-scale urban beer snobbery – when cask-conditioned ales are expected. Wow.

Then we headed three miles north – again, amazingly easy, despite cutting right through the heart of Portland. The city's bicycling lanes are so well-defined and uninterrupted that at no point, despite traffic all around us, did I ever feel unsafe. Man, I love this town. Our new destination was the Widmer Brothers Gasthaus, where we sat down and enjoyed the pleasantly sunny weather (I swear it never got above 84, while it was sweltering back home in Austin) outside on their sidewalk tables. I think I tried their summer seasonal (damn me for not writing this down two months ago!). Yes, the obvious urge was to have the Broken Halo IPA, one of my favorites, but why taste something that I can get back in Austin? Unfortunately, I seem to remember my adventurousness letting me down a bit; I wasn't super-impressed. We also tried some sort of cherry beer, maybe a lambic, but we all agreed its sourness was a bit much.

Off again, up an ungodly steep hill (okay, Bill was a great tour guide, but not perfect). We worked our way over to Laurelwood Pizza Company. They had a mighty tasty sampler tray as well as fine artichoke dip. And they had a play area for the kids — always a brilliant idea to combine amenities for the kids with beer. This type of forethought is what makes me a loyal customer of Brentwood Tavern and Phil's Ice House/Amy Ice Cream here in Austin. I seem to remember liking everything Laurelwood had on tap.

From there, we headed up some more stiff hills so that we could take up a game of darts at the Horse Brass, a beautifully authentic British-style pub – think the Draught House, only about four times bigger. I got my butt kicked at darts, but I consoled myself with something hoppy. In fact, I think the really hoppy brew was actually Bill's, but I liked it better than what I ordered, so I mooched off his.

Sadly, that ended our pedaling tour. (But boy, wouldn't the folks at New Belgium have been proud of me!) My wife has been suffering from some kind of malady that causes dizziness, and a phone call from her cut short our travels, despite the fact that Bill had mapped out two other stops for us. (Thankfully, I still had another day to squeeze in more bars.)

I have to say, other than the obligatory (day I got married, day my older daughter was born, day my younger daughter was born), this rated as one of the five greatest days of my life. A wonderful bike ride, great beer, and even better friends — how could it get any better than that? Thanks for organizing, Bill!

Portland, part 1: Oregon Brewers Festival

Well, darnit, like I always do, I've wasted too much time after a great event to blog about it. Jeez, it's been almost two months. Now I've probably forgotten a lot of the great stuff. Ah well, I'll drink this bottle of Pranqster and try to reassemble my memories of a really wonderful vacation.

Man, there is so much to like about Portland. If I've ever been tempted to leave Austin, this might be the city that does it. From the political angle, they are doing so much that I want Austin to embrace – encouraging smart, mixed-use development downtown instead of building more highways out to sprawling suburbs, building a first-rate mass transit system, and making the city as friendly as possible toward bicycling. Climate-wise, it was such a refreshing break from Texas – the hottest it ever got was 84. And get this: There are no bugs. Seriously. Bill and Carla would leave their windows open all day and night, with no screens. If you tried to do that in Austin, you'd be completely drained of blood by sunrise. (For more on the nondrinking aspect of our trip, consult M'Lady's blog.)

And then, of course, there was the beer. My god, was there beer. Was it my imagination, or was there really a brewpub on every single block?

The trip started off not at a brewpub, but at the 20th Annual Oregon Brewers Festival. You're not going to believe this, but as much as I love the brew, this was my very first beer festival. Man, walking in for the first time was overwhelming – there was just so much from which to choose. I was paralyzed with indecision. I only had about two hours, enough tokens for about 20 samples, and 72 possibilities. Eventually, however, I settled into a groove.

Very quickly, I started trending in an IPA-ish direction. I discovered during the trip that Portlanders love their IPAs. Maybe it's because the hops are so fresh up there, but it seemed like every place I went had one. So the standards were pretty high, and not just any old IPA would do. Case in point was Hopworks Urban's (Portland) Organic IPA, which was merely average. And Ram Restaurant and Brewery (Salem, Ore.) had a double IPA — normally a sure winner with me — that let me down. Some fruit notes, but not a lot going on flavor-wise.

Much better was the double IPA from Standing Stone (Ashland, Ore., and not to be confused with California's Stone Brewery). This wonderful hop overload quickly convinced me that I wanted a full mug instead of a mere three-ounce sample (samples cost one token, full mugs cost four). I figured that was as good as it was going to get, but I was wrong. My friends kept telling that I absolutely had to try Russian River's (Santa Rosa, Calif.) Pliny the Elder, also a double IPA, so I finally grabbed some near the end. It was even better than Standing Stone. It tasted both sweet and bitter simultaneously (um, perhaps "bittersweet" is the word I'm looking for here, duh) and had an absolutely magnificent nose. Another full mug was called for, and things got a bit foggy at that point.

There were more than IPAs, of course. Bison Brewing (Berkeley, Calif.) offered up a tasty Organic Chocolate Stout. I'm normally a tad leery of chocolate stouts, because too often the chocolate is overdone, but I seem to recall this having a nice balance, with tasty coffee notes as well. Grand Teton's (Victor, Idaho) Bitch Creek ESB was a rich, full-bodied brew. Sprecher (Glendale, Wisc.) surprised me with a mai bock, or "blonde bock," a style I'm unfamiliar with. It didn't look particularly blonde, and it was not what I expect from a bock — definitely lighter, not with the typical malt punch. Tasty, though.

And of course my taste for Belgians was humored: Flying Fish (Cherry Hill, N.J.) entered a Bourbon Barrel Abbey Dubbel; I vaguely remember it now, but my notes say "weird, but good." Terminal Gravity (Enterprise, Ore.) had a trippel that disappointingly had no flavor (maybe that's why the program described it as "a taste that's hard to define.") Max's Fanno Creek Brew Pub (Tigard, Ore.) had a nice Saison Golden, a style I've really warmed up to. That didn't compare, though, to those wicked good brewers at Stone Brewing (Escondido, Calif.), makers of several things I love including a great IPA and the wonderfully named Arrogant Bastard. This time, their entry was a saison named Stone 07/07/07 Vertical Epic. My notes say "OMFG." I seem to remember rushing back to our camp and demanding that everyone try some. It's the best saison I've ever had.

You know what? This post has rambled on for too long, and my experience as a professional writer is that people quit reading after a certain point. So we'll call this "Part 1" — stay tuned for future installments soon.

No, seriously.

Really: I swear, swear, swear I will do my full-length write-up of my magnificent trip to Portland very soon, but I haven't had time the past two weeks because I've been adjusting to my new job as a staff writer for the Chronicle. In the meantime, you'll just have to satisfy yourself with this abbreviated synopsis that I did for our food section.

And damn, could I look any goofier in that photo? (Wait, don't answer that.)