Dream vacation: volume all the way up

Silly me. I didn't need an alert reader to show me that the "Travel Portland" people had put their sad, desperate full-page ad in the Seattle newspaper. The same oddity was sitting in my kitchen counter the whole time, nestled away on page 7 of the national edition of the Sunday New York Times.

Those Times ads go for nearly a quarter-million a pop, from what I hear. That's a lot of dough for a curious come-on that seems to have been written by a summer intern.

Political turmoil as a tourist attraction? It's crazy. "Come smell the tear gas. Come see the boarded-up storefronts, and the empty ones. Maybe the police DJ From Hell will be outside your hotel window all night with the anarchists. We keep it real." No mention of the homeless camps and aggressive panhandlers. You have to leave a few surprises.

Anyway, it's heartwarming to see all those tax dollars going to try to stanch the bleeding from Gordon Sondland's bank account. I think it's hospitality tax dollars. At least, I hope it is.

But the cheerleaders who produced this curiosity might have waited a while longer before bringing the tourists back to our little paradise. Some friends of ours from New York stayed in a hotel downtown for several nights about three weeks ago, and their experience was so bad they were laughing about it. The mostly empty hotel was woefully understaffed, and the staff they did have on hand were inexperienced people who didn't know what they were doing. No bueno.