Sunday, March 11, 2012

A Wonderfully Odd Saturday

Yesterday morning we got up and decided to walk down the hill to get ice cream.  We have been walking places more and it has been really nice.  We wanted to check out Red Wagon Creamery as we discovered it the night before online and it sounded pretty wonderful.  They are a roving ice cream shop and they scoop at a few different places.  Originally we thought we would just be walking about 1.5 miles away.  When I check online I saw that they were in fact a little further away on Saturdays and that our trip was instead going to be 2.9 miles each way.  No problem!  No sweat.  We got on our rain jackets, hats, and put some gloves on as it was overcast and a bit chilly.


The walk into town was really nice.  We found a path through a park, walked down streets we had never been down, and commented on all the cute houses.  It was great until we got to the store.  There was a sign that said they were scooping in Springfield.  What?  They were suppose to be at Midtown!  Strike one.  After a few sad minutes of looking at their sign Cliff had a great idea.  A new brewery, Falling Sky, recently opened just a few blocks further down the road.  We had been wanting to try them out.  Sounds like a plan!  We walked a few more blocks, went inside, and consulted the menu.  Cliff noticed something funny.  They didn't have any of their beers listed on tap.  Huh?  We asked the nice guy at the counter and he explained that their first batch wouldn't be ready until this Tuesday, March 13th.  Hum.  Strike two.  I noticed that they had ice cream on their menu so I decided to try  it out.  We got their cider porter ice cream.  After all we had traveled all that way for a creamy, yummy treat.  They brought out the ice cream and it was so small!  It looked like two caramel colored golf balls in a bowl.  Cliff and I split it.  It was tasty but it just left us more hungry.  We didn't want to get anything else there as we knew we would come back later and get food and drink.  We sat at the table daydreaming about eating restaurant food.  Then we weighed our options: walk up the hill essentially with an empty stomach or travel onward to get something good to eat.  We decided to walk another mile or so to get to Little Big Burger. 


Cliff and I discovered Little Big Burger a few weeks ago.  I read about them in the Eugene Weekly as they had just opened.  It is a little chain (three in Portland and one in Eugene) that focuses on local, organic ingredients.  They have six items on their menu (hamburger, cheeseburger, veggie burger, fries, soda, and a float) plus 27 types of beer.  Their ketchup has siracha in it.  They serve the burgers on brioche buns.  They only have recycling and compost containers as nothing that they give you is trash.  Plus their food is really tasty.  Holy cow is it really tasty!   They aren't big hamburgers but they do the trick.  They are delicious.  Cliff got his burger with blue cheese and I got mine with chevre.  Amazing.  One order of their fries (with truffle oil and sea salt I might add) is more than enough for two people.  Things were looking up!

As soon as we left Little Big Burger it started to rain.  Not super hard but hard enough that my raincoat was starting to soak through.  We decided to take a totally different route back home so that we could see some different sites and walk through a fancy neighborhood.  I think we also picked the route as it passed us by Prince Puckler's Gourmet Ice Cream which is a standard in Eugene.  After all, we had come out for ice cream but we hadn't gotten our fix (the two mini scoops earlier were like an appetizer).  Stopping was a great idea as it also allowed us to get out of the rain. We split a double scoop.  One scoop chocolate oreo and one scoop mocha espresso ice cream with cinnamon.  Amazing again!

Thankfully the rain stopped for the most part as we headed back up the hill.  We walked through College Hill and oohed and ahhed over the pretty homes.  I tried to talk Cliff into going to an Open House but sadly failed.  Eugene really has a lot of character.  No matter which neighborhood you live in there is always something special and wonderful.  I like that alot about Eugene.  Besides the houses we got to see a fun painted fire hydrant.


We also got to see a hurling match on a field at a local high school.  I had never even heard of hurling before!  After seeing this, Cliff obviously decided to tell me all about the Gaelic games.  This is part of the reason why I like him so much.  We spent the next 20 minutes hurling our butts towards home as he talked about the different Gaelic sports.  I learned alot yesterday.  I'm sure you can imagine.

About half way home my shoes were starting to rub blisters on the backs of my heels, we both had to go to the bathroom, and we were still about 45 minutes away from home.  We tried to go down a new street and sadly we hit a dead end....a Grateful Dead End.  Thanks Eugene.



We pushed through and all in all we walked over 9 miles.  It was an awesome day.  It didn't go at all as we had planned but that's ok.   I think we should take long, odd-ball walks every weekend. 

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