Day 1: In which PDXWD briefly becomes NYCWD to have a talk about this relationship

Good morning. It's still dark and you're still sleeping, but we're up and having coffee and a cream-cheesed bagel in the D concourse because one nut/bolt/mitochondrion of PDXWD is going on a field trip.

New York, as you may know, has a pretty serious crush on Portland. And we'd be lying if we said that this inordinate amount of fawning we've recently received has not given us pause. We thought, therefore, that it would be best to go out there for a weekend and have a little face-to-face talk, some alone time, just the two of us, to set the record straight, to put our cards on the table, to tell it how it is. "Just play it cool, NYC, okay?" is what we're going to say. "We like you, too, but we don't need to be in a hurry here, you know. There's time. There's so much time. No rush, then, right? Let's just date for a while, and be our own cities, and keep doing what we're doing. We're a long way from each other and we don't need or want to get in over our heads right away, do we?"

And so we shall.

Also, on the way and once we're there, starting just as soon as we board this aircraft, we'll be reading Kevin Wilson's new collection of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, to which we are really looking forward, but will of course also keep you abreast about the goings-on we happen upon in the Big Apple.

All right. They just called our Zone #. Next stop: JFK.