We landed in Portland not that long ago. I’m sitting in a cafe by the main security entrance to the terminals. I haven’t been anywhere near Portland since 2000, when Jodi and I packed my car and headed west from Wisconsin to California. It was almost the same time of year, early June of 2000. I had finished my classwork and was moving to California to work on my Ph.D. research on the BaBar experiment. Jodi and I took a week to make the trip, swinging north through Montana and Washington, then down to Portland and along the Oregon and California coasts to San Francisco.
It’s as beautiful as I remember it, with Portland sitting astride the Columbia river, a mountain ridge-line its barrier to the south and rolling hills and valleys to the north. In the distant east are snow-dusted mountaintops, and a pleasant but strong wind greeted the plane as we approached the runway.
Now I’m trying to take advantage of the free wifi here to do some of the physics work I left cooking when I departed San Jose.
