Wednesday morning I woke up a bit hungover. I'd celebrated a birthday with my couchsurfing host the night before. During the celebrations I knocked my phone off of a barstool and it fell about 3 feet. The screen blinked and turned an odd tinge of blue. I didn't think much of it, but Wednesday morning it was clear that it wasn't going to turn back on. I'd broken my phone. I went to the Verizon store, but they didn't have windows phones, so I left.
I was now missing my phone and my ID and I still had about 900 miles to go. Also, my host had plans for the rest of the week, so he wasn't able to host me again. I decided to find a hostel. Unfortunately, the only hostels in town required ID. I still had my tablet, so I decided to find a coffee shop and figure out what to do from there.
I chose the coffee shop that had the coolest bikes outside. There were two beautiful fixies. Clearly, this coffee shop, Coffee House Northwest, was a bastion of Portland culture. The barista asked where I was going. "To San Francisco," I told him.
"I want to do that," he said enthusiastically. "But I don't know if I would stop in San Francisco. I think I would keep going to Ecuador."
Ray, the barista who wanted to go to Ecuador, made me the best almond milk latte I've ever had. I camped out at one of the tables and started sending emails to Tony, begging him to send me my old phone and my passport. Finally I caught him on Skype, and he agreed to send both next-day air. He also sent me a photo of my passport so that I would be able to stay at the hostel.
Ray invited me to sit at the counter so that we could talk bikes as he worked. Clearly he was an expert barista - he not only got me to move away from the table that I was camping at - he also made me feel like he was actually interested in talking to me (he claims that his desire to talk bikes was sincere, and he wasn't just trying to get me to leave the table). It turns out that the black fixie with the pink rims outside was his. He invited me to come over to the garage where he keeps his bike tools once he was off work to see if he could fix the shifting on my bike.
I spent the day in Portland, and around 5pm I headed over to the "bike shop." Not only was it a bike shop, it was also where Ray roasted coffee for work. There is something so innocent about Portland that I feel almost protective of it. It's the type of town that you read about in childrens' books - there is a community of happy people who work together and get along despite their differences. Baristas visit each other at their respective coffee shops. People hang out and listen to music and roast coffee and fix bikes and drink craft beers.
We did all of those things. I wasn't involved in the coffee roasting part, obviously, but I did learn a lot about coffee. I heard the beans' first crack as they roasted. It sounded a bit like popcorn popping. Ray got my gears shifting perfectly also. He showed me features that I never knew my bike had. Another friend showed up and Ray guided him in installing new handlebars on his own bike. I cleaned my bike and removed some of the grease that had built up on the derailleurs.
I strongly considered moving to Portland.