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| These East Coasters are considering a move to Oregon. |
Lisa Tossey, BootsnAll’s Philly Travel Guide, and her fiance Matt Amey were in Oregon over this past weekend. They came to see a friend in Bend (about three hours’ drive east of Eugene) and so Matt could check out a possible business opportunity. While here Lisa also wanted to come across the Cascade range and meet us BootsnAll guys.
They rolled in around 7:30 Sunday night, just as Sean and Ant finished shaking out the welcome mats and sweeping the floor. (Nick was out until 8:30, but he joined up then.) "Welcome to our dump!" said Sean, smiling, broom and dustpan in hand, as they got out of their car. The place was clean though, and with Lisa and Matt here it was homebrew time.
Lisa used to be a flight attendant for US Air, but she left that a while back and took a job as a "wrangler" at BeyondBooks.com, where she scours the Net for links and sites of use for educational materials that BeyondBooks compiles. She used to live in Pittsburgh, but moved to Philly a few years back. She’s been writing the Philadelphia Travel Guide since May 2000.
Though they’ve been together for some time, Lisa and Matt also live a few hours apart, she in Philadephia, he in Ocean City, Maryland, where he runs a six-man tattoo parlor near the shore. We were pretty curious about Matt – especially the seaweed, sea dragon and shipwrecks on his left arm – part of a shoulder-to-wrist tatt, some of which he did himself.
Matt actually prefers painting over tattoing, which he views more as a way to make a living, and he definitely isn’t someone you’ll want to talk to if you don’t want any stereotypical images of tattoo artists debunked. He keeps his shop and his artists up to some pretty high professional snuff. For example, in his shop drunk people don’t get tattooed – "Alcohol thins the blood, and the person would bleed too much." Matt also maintains a web site on his painting, his tattooing and his shop, at www.independent-tattoo.com (which can be viewed only with Microsoft Internet Explorer).
And yes, he has tattooed people’s arses. Two, so far.
The tattoo shop actually is how Lisa and Matt got together. They knew each other from high school, but didn’t start going out until after Lisa came to Matt’s shop for a tattoo (and no, her arse isn’t one of the two).
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Matt demonstrates the position he must use to tattoo a customer’s arse. |
Once Nick got in and downed a bottle of homebrew and joined in the chat, we headed out for some grub. Now, Eugene is by no means New York or London or Sydney, but even here you would think a few more places would still be serving at nine on a Sunday night. Just goes to show we don’t get out too often, but we did finally find a place to tuck in to some chow and microbrews.
Lisa and Matt had been complaining of feeling sore, since they’d spent Saturday snowboarding Bend’s Mt. Bachelor, and then spent Sunday horseback riding. "I’m sore from laughing so much and having to get back up so many times," Lisa said, not that we were exactly sympathetic of two people who got to spend half the weekend on the powder. Nonetheless, they were feeling up to a hike, so on Monday morning the five of us piled in the car and headed up to Mt. Pisgah, just outside Eugene.
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Anthony, Sean and Nick at the top of Mt. Pisgah, after working off last night’s beer on the hike up. |
Pisgah’s a quick hike, something you can do up and down in under two hours – a good way to wrap up their Eugene visit. A bit of sweat later we hung out at the summit, looking out towards the mountains and the urban wilds of Springfield, and then we headed back down.
After lunch Matt and Lisa headed off to the coast, to drive north up the coastal highway on the way back to Portland, where they would fly back east that night. We waved bye, but after they left we put more beer in the fridge – Lisa says they’re planning to move to Oregon this fall.
If you’re travelling to the West Coast of the USA and want to make a stop in Eugene, Oregon, click here for details on where to find us.