summer sandwiches: portland again! or in this case, grant's pass

1533 Northeast F Street, Grants Pass, OR
 http://parkwayvillagellc.com/gooseberries.php

I had so much fun the last time I was in Portland, I turned around and went straight back!  Actually, Els and I had been talking about going to Portland for a long, long time, and my last trip there was a hastily thrown together journey that didn't include Els.  It was a bro/road trip.  I wanted to say broad trip, but that doesn't quite work.  At any rate, it was time, once again, to drive through hours and hours of mountains to get to that rad city perched in the middle of the cultural desolation of Oregon.  Last time I went, I left San Francisco at something like seven in the morning in order to get to Portland before too late in the day (if you've never done it, the drive from SF to Portland is somewhere between 10 and 12 hours long..... be sure to stock up yr mp3 player before leaving...).  In order to make this drive a little less insane, we left Friday night and stayed in a hotel halfway.  Well it was supposed to be halfway, except Friday night traffic was gnarly and so we only got as far as Willows, which is only a few hours north of SF.   That meant a fair amount of driving left for Saturday, which actually ended up taking up most of the day.  We had a late breakfast (I had Burger King.... don't get the breakfast burrito there, it's awful and small and full of runny salsa, stick to the totally passable breakfast biscuit sandwich), so imagine my dismay when we passed signs indicating a MR PICKLES franchise just south of Shasta!  We were too full to stop already.  I blew it with my breakfast choice!  We would have to stop again for food before getting to Portland though, and by mid-afternoon we were deep in Oregon's mountains and our stomachs were grumbling. We got off the 5 at Hood River Grant's Pass and contemplated the assortment of fast food options, before spotting a grocery called Huckleberry's Natural Market Gooseberries Real Food & Deli (I couldn't remember the name of the market when I was writing this, just that it had berry in the name- hence my mistaken first assumption based on google results that we had stopped at a chain grocery called Huckleberry's).  Els, being a granola eating hippie, wanting to stop there for lunch, and I, being a junk-food loving carnivore who is smart enough to let his girlfriend get her way, acquiesced.  Reluctantly.  I steeled myself for a bland meal of fake meat products and foods advertising their lack of whatever we aren't supposed to be eating these days.  But inside we discovered a deli offering a variety of sandwiches, wraps, and burgers, and I'll be damned if they didn't actually sound pretty tasty (and pretty bad for you!! awww yeeaaaah).  I went with the "Huckleberry Gooseberry Special" or something like that, which was I think turkey, bacon, melted cheese (jack?) and honey mustard.  And pesto aioli, or avocado?  What's that green stuff up there?  I didn't write down the ingredients because I stupidly believed that a natural food store would have a modern website with a menu available.  Idiot.  Anyway whatever it was it was great and undoubtedly bad for me, which I appreciate, Huckleberry's Natural Market Gooseberries Natural Food & Deli.  Els got a wrap, which in my professional sandwich blogger opinion is not a sandwich, but we got photos of it anyway and here it is.  It was bacon, tomato, avocado, lettuce, dressing (caesar or thousand island?) and I'm pretty sure it had turkey or chicken.  Maybe Els remembers.  I'd ask her, but she's back in Portland!  Again!  We can't get enough of that city, apparently.  Also, she just sent me a text about a toothless man trying to trade weed for two machetes at a garage sale.  Oregon!

 

After filling our bodies with this horribly unhealthy food from the health market, we got back on the road and saw some RIDICULOUS clouds.  Look at these dang clouds!  It's hard to get a sense of scale, but this was a massive cloudbank with a really weird shape.  Good stuff, Oregon!