Irvington

Pretty well packed up last night so just a little checking, cleaning & sorting. Making sure no left passports. Breakfast & one last walk along the beach. Hard to leave - very nice cottage, with a very nice view of a very nice beach in a very nice village. I liked it. Time to go. Left at 10am giving us 3 hours to get the car back without incurring the charges that our friendly assistant tried to land us with. Should be plenty even allowing for the traffic chaos that is Portland - or at least how it seemed on our way through a week ago. The drive passed innocuously - the main sources of concern were the phone being annoyingly silent - it was clearly offended when being muted & is on a silent protest, oh and my wandering while trying to sort the silent phone. Unfortunately such mundane worries couldn't last. We hit the Portland motorway network & bizarrely the airport wasn't signposted or at least not until we knew where we were. The choice was I84 north or south. We'd been following the south signs so opted with that - it was north. Some hairy u-turn action (not on the motorway) Now the airport signs appear. Now the fun of finding petrol. The first one at the airport hadn't started in business, the next one Google took us to didn't exist - well played. Finally found one and it was considerably less than the area average of $3 Hertz claimed. Drop off was much smoother - verified that we'd avoided the surcharge & off to lugging baggage onto the metro. All very easy but noisy. Anywhere probably is noisy compared to Oceanside. Struggled a little bit finding the apartment & then heaved a sigh of relief. No crashed car & a bed for the night. Once settled, out for some lunch - a ludicrously expensive sarnie. Found a Safeway & helped the cashier with his crossword - what someone from Liverpool is called? In return he enlightened us to the joys of a Safeway card - saved $7 on this shop alone. Why no-one had offered us one before is beyond me - annoying. Liz had a relax while I scooted off for a short walk down to the river. Got to the Steel bridge & couldn't resist going across to the riverside walk. Just down to the next bridge, except you couldn't cross that on foot. Took 2 more to get back. 30 mins turned into close to 2 hours. Liz was writing happily when I got back.Read more