Today and tomorrow are my 2 days off this week. My daughter Mai and I had planned to spend today doing a little cleaning and putting up our Christmas tree and then tomorrow finding some interesting thing to do outside of the house. This is Oregon so we've had a stretch of several days of rain and we were expecting more of it. This morning however, we woke up to mostly blue skies and a pleasant, only slightly chilly day. Naturally we decided to flip our plans since there's no guarantee that tomorrow would be as nice.
After an hour of trying to plan something we decided to just play it by ear and see what we found. Instead of driving around wasting gas and paying for parking in town, we drove over to the TriMet Max light rail station close to the house. We got day passes for the train, picked a direction instead of a destination and went looking for our adventure. Now Mai rides the train to work all the time so she is used to it. This was only my 2nd time, the first being several months ago and only for a very brief distance. She got to show me how it all worked. She has all the color coding and route maps down to a science! We picked the green line to the Rose Quarter and switched to the blue line and headed towards Hillsboro.
The first train wasn't very crowded, mostly people obviously headed home from work. It was fairly uneventful with the exception of the brake locking up for a few seconds when the driver was slowing down. A few people got a little closer to each other. The second one though was wall to wall people. Now Mai and I both enjoy people watching but from looking around you would think we were the only ones. Not one person on the train made eye contact with anyone unless they were together. They read books, listened to music on headphones or poked around on their cell phones. If they were without a physical barrier they simply stared out the windows or down at the floor. Honestly I was expecting a lot more of the weirdness that Portland is famous for.
We wound up riding all the way to Hillsboro only to switch directions and ride back into downtown. After a quick cup of coffee and a little wandering, we headed to Hamburger Mary's for dinner. It was slow and a little early so we didn't hang around too long. From there it was off to Ground Kontrol for some old-school video games and a couple of drinks before reversing course and heading home.
We got back to the station where the car was parked and I couldn't find my car key in my purse. I did find it though, on the front seat of my locked car. No problem, called for help and had a coffee while we waited. It took the guy longer to fill out the paperwork than it did for him to unlock the car.
You might be thinking this doesn't sound like much of an outing but it was. It was really wonderful to see my daughter so relaxed and hear her laughing so freely, especially since only a few days ago she ended her relationship with her boyfriend of over 2 years. She has finally freed herself of the weight of taking care of someone who refused to take care of himself. She's growing and finally learning that her needs are important too. She's seen that a healthy relationship shouldn't require her to make herself less that she is meant to be. The string has been cut, the weight is off and she is free to fly.
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