What I Have Learned In Oregon

There is much to catch up on but for now I will stay with the present.

Here are the things I have learned so far in Oregon. (We have been staying in Grants Pass for a couple days now)

1. To achieve immunity to poison oak, you must feed it to chickens then eat their eggs as a young child. This wisdom was passed on to us by Chucky Greenwood, son of Charles Samuel Greenwood, a chief engineer who invented the human powered car that we got to ride the other day in Takilma, OR. http://www.humancar.com We spent the day with Chucky and his pal at Charles' home and workshop because Charles had left that morning to lecture on treehouses in Paris. It was an inspiring and hot day in a very cool stretch of Oregon. There will be hopefully more on that later because it was all rad.

2. Oregonians love good coffee and they love it in a drive thru scenario. There are over 37 drive thru coffee joints in Grants Pass alone. Ten of them are run by Dutch Brothers. One of them close to us runs 24 hours. I walked thru yesterday and got a double espresso for 50 cents. I guess you pay for the frothed milk. This chain doesn't annoy me like Starbucks. There is no compilation cd for sale, no stupid names for the different sizes, no mandate, no bullshit. Today we walked through and had a very normal conversation as if it was a local joint. A car was chugging behind us but the barristo didn't flinch and kept talking. It was awesome.

3. Oregon is beautiful. Today we filmed a spot about micro hyrdo electric systems (which are amazing) and ended up in a secluded patch of land owned by the Boy Scouts. Google the Illinois River Valley and you'll see where we hung out to chat with a burly and friendly dude named Rusty who lives there. He made sure we made time to go for a swim and the whole crew got into it. Massive mountains populated by trees that survived the fire in 2002, a deep river that was perfect and a suspension bridge that made you realize just how high sixty feet really is.

4. Drive thru Mexican food is cheap and solid in Oregon.

5. The organic blueberries on their own taste like pie.

6. Blackberries are weeds here. It's hard to go anywhere because you just want to stop and eat them all.