We love being in love. With each other, especially, but with Oregon as well. Eden’s been here her whole life, and Ashod moved to Portland in 2006 after passing through on countless rock-and-roll tours—always enamored by the cozy cafes, towering trees, and friendly people. We’re both social types who circled each other’s orbits for years before dating. We’d bump into each other at fashion shows, house parties, and backstage at friends’ concerts, flirting across crowded rooms. When our stars finally aligned, we vowed to never become the kind of couple that spends every night in sweats zoned out in front of the TV. That promise meant researching weird itineraries to impress the other and having a good time even when the weather upended our plans (which it did frequently, because Oregon). As our relationship grew, so did the amount of ground our dates covered. We visited places we had seen plastered on Instagram (hello, Painted Hills) but also stumbled upon some lesser-known gems like Clear Lake, where we floated in a rickety rowboat over a surreal forest frozen beneath the water. Our “Simonian Sunday Drives” (as Eden likes to call them—even if it’s Saturday) became a regular occurrence. Early in our relationship, Portland entered a growth spurt that has yet to show any signs of slowing. We lost our beloved neighborhood bar, Tiga, and every month since, it seems another favorite haunt is gone. While New Portland continues to rave about this hot new restaurant or that hip new bar—which, to be clear, are often wonderful—we are constantly making date-night arrangements to help support the establishments that made us fall in love with this city in the first place. We’re including many of these within—not because we want to expose our secrets but because we want to share the magic we’ve experienced and help these places thrive for years to come. In May of 2016, next to a glowing fluorescent waterfall deep in the recesses of the mine in the Seven Dwarves’ House at Oregon’s most off-thewall amusement park, Enchanted Forest, Ashod took a knee and proposed. Our love has always been infused with an appreciation of all things kitsch, and there was no place more perfect to slide on a plastic ring and make it official. These only-in-Oregon oddities inform many of the dates in this book. Whether sipping from a fishnet-stocking-clad cocktail with Darcelle, the world’s oldest living drag queen, or visiting an entire fantasy world methodically constructed from colorful rocks miles from anywhere, we always push to find the most fun and unexpected ways to spend time together. We hope you enjoy the fruits of our labor as much as we did. This introduction was meant to end there, but, as we were prepping files to send off for printing, a global pandemic changed the world. As we write this we are still in a fog of uncertainty. Will any of these beloved places be around when the book is released? Will we? Will anyone care about these silly date ideas? But then we see friends’ pleas to support neighborhood restaurants by ordering takeout, people posting nostalgic pictures of their favorite wildflower hikes, and Zoom dance party invites. Oregon will likely look different at the end of all of this, but it’s clear love and togetherness are here to stay and that is really what this book is about. We’re lucky to live in this place and will continue to hold her up no matter what. We hope you will too.
WISHING YOU AND YOURS ALL THE LOVE IN THE WORLD, Eden & Ashod
Copyright © 2021 by Eden Dawn and Ashod Simonian. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
