Honeymoon Days 11-12: Eugene

My yin and I arrived in Eugene on a Saturday afternoon, just in time to catch the tail end of the weekly Lane County Farmer's Market. As expected, the crunchiest town in the crunchiest state was literally crawling with hippies:

a drum circle, but unlike the one in Asheville

street musicians, unconnected to either drum circle

Upon closer inspection, however, these were not your run-of-the-mill hippies. They were a little edgier, a little less kempt, and a littler dirtier, which is really saying something. I got the feeling that at least a third of the people loitering in the square were either homeless, drug addicts, runaways, or a combination of all three. It made me feel a little sad, especially when we saw a pair of teenage girls walking by in bikini tops, cut-off denims, and combat boots. They were missing some teeth, and I can only assume it was a result of "meth mouth."

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Throughout our travels in the Mountain Time Zone, we saw numerous billboards warning about the drug, with catchy slogans like "meth is death" and elaborate graveyard landscapes warning passers-by. This was the first time we had actually seen evidence of the problem, though, and it made for a rather inauspicious introduction to the town:

Putting some distance between ourselves and the degeneracy, we walked across the street to the local vendors who had crowded into two square blocks of the downtown business district. They sold everything from fresh hazelnuts ($8/lb) to blueberry-banana smoothies topped with vanilla-infused whipped cream ($3). We bought one of each and eventually made our way back to a killer used bookstore we saw on the way to the farmer's market:

not our picture

After purchasing a used copy of Salman Rushdie's East, West, we found our way to our resting place for the night:

on the 1300 block of 13th Avenue, nonetheless

And our amazing hosts for the weekend:

Tarah and my doppelganger

This is the woman who once tried to "coax imaginary kittens from the dark", and it was my first time meeting her new (at least to me) beau. He is an exceptionally likeable guy, and by coincidence (or fate... or neither...) we happen to share the same musical tastes, the same inherent skepticism, and even the same name.

His has a better spelling, but this is beside the point.

The point is that my doppelganger makes his living as a photographer, and the next morning he picked up our camera to give it a test drive. In the space of ten seconds he took a photograph far superior to any we've made in the past two weeks:

see more of his work here

Perhaps a little of his mojo stayed trapped inside the lens cap because on our walk to yoga class, I was able to get some decent shots of flowers in the morning light:

example 1: composition

example 2: color

It was a fantastic class, based on my yin's favorite style of hatha, and afterwards we thanked the teachers:

two instructors at Freedom Yoga

Starving from the strenuous class, we tracked down a bakery one of the other students recommended. While the pressed sandwich wasn't quite hot enough, their bread was amazing. I hold this wood-fired oven responsible:

Hideaway Bakery

In the afternoon, we took a hike up Spencer's Butte, which looks over Eugene and is named after one of the town's founding fathers:

Tarah and my yin

Reaching the top, I asked that they pose for a picture together:

But the lighting was a little off so I asked for another:

As one can clearly see from the above, my yin did not approve of all this posing, but something grabbed her attention:

And she told me to look down at my feet:

There was a beetle doing its best to imitate Sisyphus:

I, as a devout coward, am terribly frightened of bugs, and so we scrambled our way back down the butte.

Next stop: Trinidad, California...