Trip to Oregon

Laramie is still 1000 miles from Eugene, OR, but it’s a lot closer than Milton Keynes, so after looking at flights for weeks, I finally bought them. Flights from Denver are cheaper, but Denver is fairly difficult (and expensive) to get to by bus or car, so I decided to take the somewhat-infamous Laramie-to-Denver plane before flying on to Portland.

Laramie Regional Airport

Laramie Regional Airport is the smallest airport I’ve ever seen, with one departure gate and not much else. I got there very early, so while I graded papers, I listened to the airport’s sole TV playing FOX News. The commercials were a combination of Mike Huckabee encouraging people to sign a petition to repeal harmful ‘Obamacare’, adverts for pharmaceutical and adverts for lawyers who could represent you if a particular drug had given you cancer – it was quite an unintentionally interesting combination. 

My tiny plane

The size of the airport was quite fitting considering the plane was a 19-seater propeller plane, with no ‘facilities’, no overhead storage and no cabin crew – just two pilots seated feet away. The fact we were the only plane leaving meant we had an incredibly prompt departure. It was very noisy and since it’s such a small plane, you really feel every movement, so it was fairly bumpy, but I thought it was great. The journey was supposed to take 53 minutes, but we landed in Denver after 28!

The pilots, who seemed to
just push buttons at random

When I arrived in Portland and met up with my friends, there were tears (inevitably) and I had to remind myself not to be so surprised to see people wearing Oregon sweatshirts in the airport. As soon as we arrived in Eugene, we headed straight to Sweet Life Patisserie (going to places to eat was a common theme of the weekend, including brunch in the dorms, Sweet Basil Pad Thai, Voodoo Doughnut…) I bumped into Caitlin who is from UEA and on her year abroad at the Oregon and she seemed to be really enjoying it there. Since my friend Ally recently became a UO Student Ambassador, the next day, Caroline and I went on a campus tour, which reminded me how great Oregon is and the beautiful weather certainly helped. We went to brunch at Studio One, a great little place that I hadn’t been to before, so I got to discover somewhere new. I also got a tour of Delta Tau Delta fraternity house, complete with framed charter, ridiculous composites from the 1980s with Ray-Bans and popped collars and got to see the (slightly creepy) dark room in the basement used for chapter meetings, ceremonies and so on.

I had enough time before my flight to spend 90 minutes in downtown Portland, where I got coffee at Peet’s and reacquainted myself with PDX’s hipsters before taking the MAX to the airport. I’m a big fan of Portland’s public transit – it’s apparently the envy of its (less-cool) Pacific Northwestern cousin, Seattle and I got from downtown to the airport for $2.40. I returned to Laramie to learn that six inches of snow had fallen in my absence, but most of it had disappeared by the time I got back. It was a great, if brief, trip and I hope to return in the spring.