A Wicked Weekend

My present from Erin this last Christmas was that she would pay for my ticket to go and see the musical "Wicked" in Portland. I still had to pay for the travel expenses, but she paid for her and my tickets. We ended up deciding to go last weekend. It took a while to figure out how to make it all work for the whole family without Anna missing too much school, but here's what we ended up doing.

Liz, Erin and I left on Thursday (March 26th) and drove up to Portland. We made a few short stops along the way to see Multnomah and a couple of the other nearby falls. We stayed at a hotel close to the airport, so that we could pick up Anna the next morning. She had a flight from Idaho Falls that left at 6:00 am and arrived in Portland around 10:30. We met up with her without incident, and then headed for the coast. Of course, we were in Oregon, so pretty soon it started raining. We got out to Cannon Beach around lunchtime, and after a little trip through Ecola State park, we eventually found our way to Mo's to get some lunch. There was a pretty big line there, but by agreeing to split up into two groups we got in quickly. Then it turned out there were two tables for two right next to each other, so we were pretty much together anyway. Ah, seafood on the beach.

After lunch we went back into town and hit a couple of kite shops (Erin and Liz bought kites at the second one), then an antique store, and a candy store. Then we found the same place to park that we did last time we were on the coast with Mom and Dad, and walked out on the beach by Haystack Rock. The weather was not nearly as nice as it was last time we were there! It was still drizzling, the wind was blowing, and it was cold! Erin, Anna, and I didn't last long and went back to wait in the warm car, while Liz continued to explore the sandy stretches.

She eventually returned, and we headed north to Seaside where we had a condo type place reserved for the night. It was fairly new, and pretty nice, but the room layout was not well thought out. We had dinner at a pretty good sushi restaurant that night.

Saturday morning we headed back to Portland. We made our way (through the rain again) into downtown Portland and found the Keller Auditorium where we were going to see the matinee performance of "Wicked, the Musical." After having fun negotiating all the one way streets, we found a place to park close by and had lunch at a Quiznos, finishing up just at the right time to head over to the theater. We had pretty good seats about 15 rows back on the main floor in the center section. As we entered the auditorium we were greeted with the sight of a map of Oz where the curtain would normally be, and a big animated dragon over the top of the proscenium.
They definitely know how to gear up the anticipation for the show. And it was a spectacular show.

For those who don't know, "Wicked" is the untold story of the witches of Oz. It turns out that the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North were roommates at sorcery school. I won't spoil the story for you, but it has quite a few twists and turns before you get to the end. For our performance, it turned out the understudy was playing the role of Glinda, but she and the rest of the actors were all wonderful. The really amazing thing, though, with professional productions is what they can do with the sets and lighting. We do a pretty good job on our sets at MTI, but when you have the amount of money they have on Broadway and with these touring productions, and professional set builders, they can pull off some pretty jaw-dropping stuff.

After the show we drove around town a bit and found Powell's Bookstore. A friend of Erin's told her about this place, and it is huge! Pretty much a whole city block with multiple levels and multiple rooms all filled with books. We spent a little over an hour there -- I found a book that was published a few years back that attempts to rank the best baseball players throughout history from 1 to 75 or so. So far I've made it through number 7, and it's pretty interesting.

Another place we heard about from a couple of people was Voodoo Doughnuts, so next we set out to try and find that. It wasn't too far from the bookstore, but more fun with the one way streets, and the fact that this place is pretty small, caused us to take a while to find it. When we did, there was no place to park. After we drove around in circles for a while we dropped Erin and Liz off and Anna and I continued to circle and picked them up when they got out. They have some pretty crazy flavors there.

We finally headed to our hotel for the evening, which wasn't too far away. We ordered in pizza, and Liz and Erin enjoyed the pool before we turned in for the night. Sunday morning we found a church not too far away, and attended Sacrament meeting before heading back to change and check-out of the hotel and head back home. We needed to get back to Boise for Anna to catch a 9:45 flight from here to Idaho Falls. The weather was pretty good until we got close to LeGrande, and then we hit some pretty good snow for a stretch, but it never really stuck to the roads so it wasn't too bad. We made it back in plenty of time, especially since her flight got delayed. She eventually made it back to a snow storm in Idaho Falls around 11:30. Her friend Carrie picked her up and they slowly made their way back up to Rexburg.

That was our Wicked weekend. If you get a chance to go see this show, do it!