Encounters With Old Friends 2

Last Friday I had the privilege of driving to Centralia for the day! You might be tempted to ask, "What's in Centralia??" Well, not too much...except on that particular day, Harmony Deiy was there! Harmony lives near Portland and I have not spent quality time with my friend since last summer. So we decided that we needed to do something about that. We both jumped in our cars and headed to meet in the middle: which I proclaimed to be Centralia due to its name, but apparently that was not quite the truth as Centralia is not really so central if you're coming from Portland instead of Vancouver. So I drove an hour and Harmony drove a little more. We had a great day shopping at the outlets and eating the hugest hamburgers we'd seen in a long time--and the ironic thing? We got them at a pizza place! They were delicious and it was great to spend the day catching up.

Also a highlight to the trip was that Autumn came with me so she could do some research for her thesis. She didn't spend most of the day with us, but it was fantastic to have someone in the car with me and she was also able to grab some coffee with Harm and I before we left.

Something funny we saw while driving through Centralia was the "ART YARD." It was the epitome of folk art in someone's yard. I think he gives tours if you pay him enough, which we didn't. It reminded me of something out of a Tim Burton film, so we carefully walked past it, snapped a photo, and then headed on our merry way--glad that nothing terrifying had come out of this yard full of junk...I mean, uh...art.

The other funny thing about meeting up with Harmony is that while we were reminiscing about our Europe trip (which was almost a year ago already!), we began to wonder what had happened to our new friend we met at the Colosseum in Rome. We spent a good part of the day touring Rome with him and his buddy from Colorado. He was an Israeli American who was going to be on Israeli Idol (like American Idol--but not, because it's in Israel...) that summer. We googled him and found that our friend-for-a-day had not won the competition, but had still gone pretty far in the show. We even found a youtube of him singing--not too shabby.