Em Graduates

So I'm in Seattle, it's been a hectic few days but it seems calm now.
I packed up my motorcycle and left at sunup on Friday . Somehow this time (unlike my San Diego trip) I didn't have as much stuff to pack. It was nice to not have my saddle bags bulging at max capacity. I had driven this route a number of times before so it was all scenery I had seen. Beautiful though. I headed north on 680 to 80 to 505 to I-5. Turns out the Interstate system is called the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. I-5 is pretty much just OK going into northern California. It gets good when you start climbing into the Cascades up near Lassen and Shasta. That whole stretch is great all the way into the middle of Oregon when you come back down out of the mountains. I got lunch in Yreka around noon, continued north and then stopped a little north of Rouge River to nap. It was nice to be able to sleep outside and not get bugs on you or be bothered by the grass since with motorcycle riding gear, you're pretty much immune to the elements. I slept for some period of time and then continued north. I got into Portland around 6 and rode to Dave Vigil's house. We went and walked down Alberta St. in the Concordia district. Very neat, the whole area is restricted so that only non-chains and locally owned businesses can exist. We got dinner at this great mexian / asian / american / italian restaurant (4 separate menu sections). Had lots of good beer. We walked all around and Dave showed me everything to see in the world of the hip and socially conscious Portlandite. We headed back to his place and I went to sleep.
Woke up at sunup and packed up to head to Seattle. This leg of the trip wasn't very fun. The backstory here is that since around Monday, I'd been having really weird heart stuff going on, unlike anything I'd had before. I have what are called PVCs or premature ventricular contractions. It basically feels like your heart skips a beat. Anyhow, that's going on, sometimes for 3 hours at a time. It's been scaring me and on my ride from Portland to Seattle it was doing it the whole way. Distracting and scary. Makes the ride unfun. The day prior it had gone on for about an hour around lunch and and hour when I arrived in Portland. So I arrived in Seattle earlier than I'd expected, rode to my sister and her fiancee's apartment. Met up with my family, who were assembling to go to my sister's graduation at Husky Stadium. I decided to call Kaiser to see what I should do about my heart cause it was getting beyond what I was comfortable with. They said I should go into the ER right now so I had my Dad drive me to a hospital. He stayed with me which I was against (since I wanted him to see his daughter, and probably the only Wood of this generation, graduate). They checked me out and so forth. It was nice to have company. Back at the house, where Emily, my mom and Geoff were, Geoff's car had died. My Dad's car was at the hospital. Anyhow, to make a long story short (too late) nobody ended up going to graduation, no walking, no cap and gown, I got some drugs to calm me down we came back to the apartment and hung out and talked. Later we went to Volunteer park and had dinner, then climbed the water tower there, which I'd never done before. Great views from the top of it. I headed to my hostel in downtown and slept in a bunk in a room with a bunch of european guys.
I got up Sunday and rode around west of Queen Anne then went to Em and Geoff's. They went for a long walk (not off a short pier) and I hung out. We then went into downtown and saw The Italian Job remake which I really liked. I'm looking forward to seeing the original. I rode back to my hostel and found that I had the fortune of staying in the same dorm room but all by myself. This fortune would turn out the next morning to be misfortune when the latching mechanism inside the door handle to the bathroom, inside the dorm room broke. Standing in my underwear, I first attempted to get the latch open by using part of the innards of the toilet. I then attempted to remove the hinges without any tools and could only get one off. Had anyone been in the dorm room with me I could have just banged on the door and asked someone to help me from the outside. No such luck. I stopped and took an inventory of the stuff available to me in the bathroom (which wasn't much). In the medicine cabinet (which was empty) there were two glass shelves. The shelves were held in by brackets. I took a bracket out and pounded it into a thin flat piece of metal. I slipped the metal into the gap between the door and the wall and using another piece of the toilet pulled the latch in and opened the door. It took about 10 minutes but I felt like the king of the world. Rode around capitol hill and the U district. And here I am now at Em's place.