home sweet home

After a 3 hour delay in Cinci, I am back home in Alabama (otherwise known as Africa). The Milwaukie experience was a good one, although we weren't able to completely solve the problem we were sent up there to investigate. I was, however, able to go through 2 large Duncan Donuts coffee's! We don't have those down here, so I had to take it when I could get it. I also got myself a Usingers Polish Sausage while in town. You have to get something that an area is famous for and Milwaukee is famous for sausage (and beer).

After our first day of tedious testing and troubleshooting, Russ and I were ready to kick back and have a little fun. We hopped in the Camry and headed down to the river walk. I think we were both shocked with how safe and clean downtown Milwaukie was. There were a lot of young people out and about going to and from their downtown condos. We had a significant number of restaurants to choose from in the downtoan area.

When doing some research online, I found an interesting place called "the safehouse". Supposedly, the restaurant has a spy theme; from the food, to the waitresses, to the location of the restaurant. To get into the safehouse, you had to go down an alley to a building that said "international exports" and then figure out a way to get into the restaurant. Notice the red lettering on the sign to the left spells "safehouse". This sounded like fun, so we headed down to the Front street alley.



When you open the door, you are greeted by a women sitting in a chair against the wall of a small room. This definitely didn't look like a restaurant. In a French accent, she asked us for the password. Russ and I listed off various words in hopes of triggering some sort of reaction from her, but to no avail. She then threw Russ a Spanish cape of some sort and then told me to get down on the floor and charge Russ like a bull. I did this, figuring it was all in good fun. She responded with, "again". Once more, I charged Russ using my fingers as horns. Another "again" and I followed with another charge. She then told Russ to pull out his sword and finish me off. Russ pulled his imaginary sword from it's sheath, lunged my direction, and then I did my best play dead impression on the floor. That seemed to be enough for the women because she pressed a button that opened a bookcase to reveal a secret passageway. Cool! We headed down the hallway to a dead end, where another wall opened to reveal the hidden restaurant inside. When we walked in, everyone was cheering us with the fingers on their heads (indicating the Bull). I thought to myself, "wow, they must know what we did because they all had to do the same thing." Nope, not the case. I turned around to notice TV monitors everywhere pointing to the room with the girl that we were just in. Turns out that everyone has to do something different, and rediculous, to enter the restaurant (at the amusement of those already inside). We had a good laugh and then proceeded to watch all of the others do crazy things to get in. All in all, the food wasn't that great, but it was fun watching people do the Can Can, hula hoop, sword fights, and do come crazy dancing to get into the restaurant.

The next day, we finished testing and headed back to the airport. I would like to go back up there someday and spend some more time exploring downtown. It looks like a fun place to be.