Sunday, Sunday...

One of our challenges while traveling in different countries was dealing with Sundays. In big chunks of the world, especially Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe, we got used to stocking up on food, and not making any plans for shopping or sightseeing on Sundays because most places would be closed. Add in a holiday and even London, the cosmopolitan crossroad of the world looked as dead as the day after a zombie uprising. At least that’s how it seemed a couple of years ago when we landed at Heathrow on Easter Sunday.

Coming from the United States, home of the 24/7 economy, we’re a bit spoiled knowing that at any moment we can get our fourth meal at 3:00 am, or buy a flat-screen TV whenever we damn well please. Imagine our surprise when wanted to go to Old Navy and Target today for a few last minute things for our trip and found out they were closed. What??? Was there a holiday or something? Okay, maybe Easter is a biggie on the calendar, but for the born-again pagans in the room, not to mention the Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Atheists in our country, it seems a little unfair that things don’t close down for Yom Kippur, or Eid Al Fitar, or even election day.

But all was not lost. Kinkos was open so we could get more business cards made and Powells was not only open, it was teeming with everyone else in Portland who needed to get out of the house. If you’ve never been to Powells City of Books, it’s something akin to a Mecca for bibliophiles. As the biggest independent bookstore in the country (it might even be THE biggest bookstore) there’s not much that you can’t find at Powells. Our quest involved finding some books we wanted to read during our upcoming 33 hours of travel and subsequent beach lounging. Since we’re committed to traveling light, the criteria of our reading material was not only that it was mildly entertaining, but be something we’d be happy to leave along the way—our own little bookmobile.