Reporting from the road II: destination reached

More miles more smiles. Or, in our case, less miles less weird stuff.

During the drive today, I saw a bit fewer things than expected but not anything out of statistical expectation based on yesterday’s observation.

Very succintly, yesteday the drive was 383 miles, and today it was 285 miles. Since there were 8 interesting things seen yesterday, if the rate is the same, we expect to see 6 today. I like error bars, so 6 ± sqrt(6) or 3-9 remarkable things expected.

Without further delay, here’s the report.

  • The Human Bean, which in this instance is a coffee shop. That’s not the remarkable part. I distinctly recall someone on MB recently using the term, I think in some identifyably Oregon context. Maybe I made that up. I can’t find where I saw it. Before that it was a phrase sometimes heard in my house growing up. Not much heard by me after leaving there. Maybe it’s an Oregon thing? Hard to back that up.
  • “Fish Viewing Area.” This has got to be about the most Oregon (or pacific northwest) thing ever. You don’t notice these things until you’ve been away for a while and realize that you didn’t see anything like that anywhere else in all the other places that you’ve been.
  • The adult shops. I was in Portland a month ago and there were quite a few. My recollection is that is actually usual. I was expecting to see some similar number on the drive this time, but there were only few, in the places I remember them being. I think I have enough to do, but I suppose I could do some counting to estimate the prevalence here vs other places.
  • A whole lot of rain. Very on-brand for Oregon, but also kind of unusual for mid-May. Thank goodness for Rain-X!

Seeing 4 remarkable things is a little low, but maybe 8 was a bit high yesterday. Small numbers are trickly like that. I’ll get another shot in a couple of weeks when traveling in the reverse direction back south.

J. Garo @garo