Dance Ali Dance: Corvallis - The First Chapter

Day 72 (Friday Dec 3rd)
"If you ever wanna kick it sometime."

My bus was at 11am so I woke up at about 9. Max hadn't gone to school because he was ill... I don't think going to bed at 2am had helped. I think he just wanted to stay home so he could say good bye to me at the bus stop. Tina made me jam on toast and I got all my stuff packed up. We drove to the bowling alley/bus station and Tina got a "nice" photo of me and Max. A lot of the people getting on the bus were headed to the college football game in Corvallis between The Ducks and The Beavers, one guy had won tickets and he was the first person in America that I'd seen chewing tobacco... lovely.

All the guys at the back of the bus were talking nonsense about football, politics and guns. One man across from me was trying to chat up the woman sitting behind him. After some general chat he stepped it up a gear by complimenting the curls in her hair, then he moved in for the kill by asking if she did her own nails. He actually got her number and asked for it by saying "You know, if you ever wanna kick it sometime." It was actually quite a pleasant bus journey because the snowy views were pretty all the way and I also got to see the first proper looking mountain (Mt. Fuji looking) that I'd ever seen in person. I eventually got fed up of listening to the guys talking crap on the bus so I listened to some Adam & Joe XFM radio shows. At one point I stopped my mp3 player because everyone was talking a bit louder and just as I stopped it one guy on the bus said "Keanu Reeves and an English guy."

We arrived in Corvallis over an hour late, we'd left Bend about half an hour late and actually stopped a couple of times for breaks, buses are quite relaxed in Oregon. I'd missed the bus that would get me to Ali's apartment so for the first time in my life I went into a Starbucks. I killed an hour with a hot chocolate and the internet as I waited for Ali to finish work. Ali turned up around 5pm and greeted me with a big hug, we drove back to her place and she showed me to my room. Her apartment is really nice and modern, it has some weird heating and I tried to help her figure out where the heat comes from, we decided it was probably under-floor heating. We went out for Mexican food and I loved how the waitress was using basic Mexican on us, it felt like we were in a Mexican themed restaurant rather than in an actual Mexican restaurant... which we were. I had a spinach quesadilla and it was delivered to me in the shape of a face. After a lovely meal and about half an hour of loitering in the restaurant we went grocery shopping and then headed back home. Ali showed me her DVD collection and we decided upon License To Drive starring Haim, Feldman and Heather Graham because Ali couldn't believe I hadn't seen it. After the movie Ali went to bed and I booked my flight to NYC before I lay my head down for the night. It wasn't a great night's sleep because the heating confused me, half the night I was freezing under all the blankets and for the other half I was almost naked with no covers.