Exploregonians

The box read “We want to go to Kyoto in your car” in Japanese, and a pair of women driving to Osaka for a One Direction concert gave the hitchhiking Katie and Jordan a ride from a roadside Starbucks. They were close to Kyoto, but toured around Osaka for a couple days, eating fried octopus balls, touring the iconic castle, and enjoying the Glico Running Man. When they returned a week later to Osaka, Katie accidentally booked a love hotel right next to the wrong airport and the duo had the best time in their extravagant, rent-by-the-hour room. Also, Jordan was fooled again by ordering what he thought was an iced latte and receiving a tall glass of milk with coffee ice cubes. Oh, Japan!

Ten years ago, Katie uninvited Jordan from Newport’s Seafood and Wine Festival and he still hasn’t let it go. Katie enjoys the marriage of grunge and bourgeois in Newport and Jordan declares Newport as the Capital of the Coast before talking about the first celebrity he ever met: Keiko the orca, star of Free Willy. Katie is weirded out Newport’s Ocean to Bay Trail doesn’t end at Yaquina Bay, but seemingly someone’s yard in town and once received the shirt of a barista’s back at the local Dutch Bros. Jordan tells Katie about how Newport is the western terminus for Highway 20, the longest road in the United States, and also how he was probably unaware of highway signage as a child because he was busy creating and choreographing a jukebox musical about the cast of Super Mario Bros. to the discography of Shania Twain.

Jordan won front row tickets to Hamilton in New York City, which spurred a crazy two-day planning spree. Katie and Jordan have been together almost ten years, so it's only fitting they have now seen ten shows on Broadway. When they weren’t being dazzled by theatre, they were experiencing some of the most classic buildings in Manhattan like Grand Central Terminal and the flagship building of the New York Public Library, where Katie and Jordan met the real Winnie-the-Pooh (and friends) that inspired A.A. Milne’s classic books. Katie declares her love of outdoor NYC dining and Jordan regrets not asking Seth Meyers for a writing job.

Because it is Valentine's Day, Jordan reads an excerpt from his memoir recounting pivotal moments in their relationship at Pacific City. Katie once drove Jordan to an interview in Pacific City and dropped him off like the good babysitter she is after they imagine the rom-com Country/City. Pacific City’s Haystack Rock is one hundred feet taller than its sibling in Cannon Beach and a mile offshore. Jordan thinks it is objectively superior and tells Katie some people refer to it as Chief Kiawanda Rock.

Katie forgot a swimsuit for a European trip so went to a Budapest bathhouse in just her underwear and Jordan talks about getting his chest hair in someone's pizza. Budapest is, to Katie and Jordan's surprise, two cities named Buda and Pest, separated by the Danube River! Biggest regret? Not getting a sweatshirt that read "BUDA SEXY PEST". Before Katie's birthday, the two stumbled into Budapest's original ruin bar, an enormous abandoned factory where wild art is everywhere and every nook and cranny is filled with a bar and someone mixing spirits and pouring beer. Ruin bars are the strangest, most amazing thing Katie and Jordan experienced in the city. They are basically dystopian McMenamins.

Wizard Island! Old Man of the Lake! Phantom Ship! Jordan thinks Crater Lake National Park is the GOAT of naming things. Katie accuses Jordan of not liking lakes and suggests he is backwoods, being raised on rivers and fed crawdads, just like all the nonnative fish that have been stocked in Crater Lake from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mount Mazama blew 7,700 years ago and its caldera was filled over time to make Crater Lake the deepest in the United States, yet only the ninth in the world. What gives? Jordan also says, "What gives?" about Oregon being home to only one national park and Katie thinks it's just enough.

Katie and Jordan are off to school! Without any teaching credentials, the Inthanon school headmaster begrudgingly allows the honeymooners to assist the local English teacher, who quickly became Jordan’s favorite person in all his travels. Katie and Jordan are whisked away to help at “English Camp” which isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds. To get there, they load up the buses, which are truck beds piled high with fifteen children each and Jordan is threatened during the ride by a village boy who looks suspiciously similar to Jaden Smith. Katie talks about her favorite nugget of wisdom from English Camp: Florio can get some drinks.

Thick clouds dumped an inch of snow an hour for 15 hours straight during Katie and Jordan's second wedding anniversary, marooning them in Downtown Bend an extra night and leaving the whole city seemingly abandoned for themselves to explore. Katie learns a hard lesson about drinking lots of beer before trying on fancy jeans and Jordan experiences some intense self-inflicted-manbun-induced body dysmorphia looking at frumpy pictures of himself from that trip. A barista gave Katie and Jordan gummy worms on their coffee lids and wrote her phone number down under them and Jordan recalls his favorite voicemail of all time, which came from Katie a few months before they started dating.

Katie and Jordan get the ol’ Chiang Mai Shanghai in this week’s adventure. What started as a trip to teach English turns out to be ten days in a village atop Doi Inthanon, the highest peak in Thailand where Catholicism rules and the priest is a demi-god. On the first day, Katie and Jordan are welcomed to a house blessing as guests of honor where they eat the spiciest food of their life and pound rice whiskey for the ceremony. Jordan has a mental breakdown attempting to use a poorly installed squat toilet and Katie realizes she’s technically been to the Himalayas.

A tornado (or waterspout, depending on who you ask) tore through downtown Manzanita; Katie and Jordan rushed to cover it for the local newspaper, without really considering how storm-chasing would go in the town Katie used to call home. Jordan talks about the 16th Century treasure supposedly buried somewhere on Neahkahnie Mountain and Katie reminds everyone about the catastrophe of a movie that was inspired by the legend. The coast of Manzanita was home to a pair of shipwrecks and Jordan talks about how the mythical galleon of the "Beeswax Wreck" was recently discovered. Then, of course, Jordan goes on a tirade about the formation of Led Zeppelin.

Katie and Jordan were evacuated out of Yellowstone National Park and need to tell you all about it. As the snow started to dump, it made the bison look even more magnificent and somehow made the duo think that coyotes were wolves and a single cow elk was somehow a moose. The night before the evacuation out of the world's first national park, the pair watched a man in their lodge make a huge mess cutting a cork out of a wine bottle with some scissors and helped a woman who slipped on the grate because it was, "slicker than owl shit", put her on a luggage cart and rolled her back to her room.

December 13 is Katie and Jordan's wedding anniversary, and to celebrate, the duo reminisce on one of their most treasured anniversary adventures to New York City! Jordan finally sees his first proper Broadway musical with a revival of "Hello, Dolly!" featuring Bette Midler and David Hyde Pierce and Katie regrets not accepting free tickets from a Radio City employee to see the Rockettes. Jordan will always remember seeing the First Century Roman bust that bears an uncanny resemblance to Ralph Fiennes as Tom "I am Lord Voldemort" Riddle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Katie launches into a second edition of her Christmas quiz and blows Jordan's mind with the revelation that Santa Claus is red because of a Coca-Cola rebrand.

When the weather outside is frightful, Oregon is always delightful! The month of December has Katie and Jordan reminiscing on tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago! Jordan tells his wife about his first experience to ZooLights that ended before it began in a shipping container full of toilets for a catostrophic trip to the "bathroom" and Katie quizzes Jordan on everything from the exact number of gifts given in the "Twelve Days of Christmas" song to which country celebrates the holiday with the traditional bucket of KFC.

Sorry, Vancouver, but Victoria is, apparently, the capital of British Columbia! Katie and Jordan visit the city on the world's 43rd largest island (a fun fact Katie says may be a little too obscure to be fun) and Jordan talks about donating his DNA to the Mormon Church. Yay! Victoria is home to North America's second oldest Chinatown, which leads to Jordan going on a tirade about Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco (1996). On a birthday trip to Victoria, the duo discuss having high tea, walking parallel to a mobile rave, and seeing the late, great Aaron Carter, live in concert. Let's go to Canada, eh?

Salem, Oregon doesn't have any witch trials (that Katie and Jordan are aware of...) but the capital of Oregon is home to many great parks and one contains the wettest nutria, a legendary rodent Katie had always heard of on the farm but never saw. Knowing Salem, allegedly, grows cherries in some form, Katie guesses Salem's nickname is "Poppin' Cherries", for some reason, and Jordan muses about the multiverse and the one where he befriends Katie at a younger age. Katie informs Jordan that Oregon's Capitol building's iconic Gold Man is hollow, which sends Jordan on a spiral talking about chocolate bunnies.

Guadalajara's Colonia Americana district has recently been named the coolest neighborhood in the world and Katie and Jordan stayed in the heart of it! Vibrant colors! Mariachi music! Lucha libre! Guadalajara is considered by many to be the cultural center of Mexico and captured Katie and Jordan's hearts and completely changed the way they think about our neighbors south of the border. Katie maybe went to an underground club by herself and Jordan is mostly positive his cousin is the time traveling drummer he saw in his favorite Guadalajara restaurant.

Eastern Oregon is much farther east than many people we talk to realize and this week, Katie and Jordan talk about vibrant Baker City, named not for baker potatoes, but the only sitting U.S. senator killed in military combat - and Katie researches it in real-time! Jordan talks about the time he tried to take Katie to Baker City and ended up in Burns instead, while Katie describes the five scenic byways that pass through Baker and tries her hardest to pronounce author and Oregon outdoors reporter Grant McOmie's name correctly. Let's head east to Baker City, and remember that Bend is, in fact, in Central Oregon!

Romantic images of pizza and gelato conjured within the minds of Katie and Jordan when they thought of Italy -- only to be replaced by a deserted alpine resort town and eating the tavern's last sandwich. The Dolomites are a mountainous region within Europe's Alps range and UNESCO has described them as among the most beautiful mountains in the world. In this episode, Katie and Jordan stumble around the Italian Dolomites during the offseason where everyone is gone and nothing is open and walk to the next village over for a bit to eat and a bottle of wine. This experience showed that there is more to Italy than beautiful coastline and pasta.

In the land of canneries, historic buildings that transform into breweries, and exactly one might column, Katie and Jordan visit maybe Oregon's film mecca: Astoria! (Sung to the tune of Rihanna's 2008 masterpiece "Disturbia".) The city is the oldest American settlement west of the Rockies and one of Katie and Jordan's favorite cities in the Pacific Northwest. In 1940, Katie's grandfather drove a team of horses to net salmon out of the Columbia River and Jordan is concerned Tillamook schools are obsessed with Salmon Curriculum and teach about zero other fish. Are there other fish?

Every day in the city of Si Racha, the ancestral home of the namesake sauce, was a strange adventure as Katie and Jordan watched raw hunks of meat slap tigers in the face and elephants trunk-chugging beer. The plane landed in Bangkok about 12:05 a.m. on January 1 and Katie and Jordan are nearly denied entrance into "The Land of Smiles" because they had no idea where they were staying and lacked adequate language to describe the situation. Listen this week as the Exporegonians chat about every hourly faux pas they committed in Thailand, from battling toilet frogs and tromping around wearing boots like Gaston.