Orange Tie o’ the Day goes to this pizza builder at Pizza Slut in Portland. This guy was a gallant and trusting soul. I spent less than an hour with him, in another less than ideal vacation situation, but he is one of the characters I choose to remember about our trip. Because of the weird snowstorm of 3 days prior to the day I met him, it still wasn’t easy for us to find an open restaurant. And we couldn’t find food places that were back in the delivery business. Not even Dominoes would send food our way, so I scoured the online pickings for nearby food places which would allow me to arrange an order I could come by and pick up. It had to be close enough that I could hoof it there and back to the hotel without freezing myself to the sidewalk ice. Finally, Pizza Slut took my pick-up order online—although they were so busy that the order I put in at 8 PM on Friday could not be fulfilled until Saturday at 1:00 PM. I jumped at the opportunity for any pizza, any time.
So the next day—just a few hours before the Springsteen concert—I winterized myself the best I could at 12:30 PM and stepped onto the still-iced Portland sidewalks. I followed the directions to Pizza Slut on my phone until it said I was at my destination. I looked around to find myself at a bar called Dante’s. I was cold, so I went in to ask directions to the pizza place, and behold—in a corner of Dante’s was a dark little cubby of an area called, of course, Dante’s Pizza Slut. Clever. The pizza guy asked if he could help me, and I explained I had placed an order last night and I was there to pick it up. The guy said, “We haven’t been able to take any online orders since the storm shut down our IPads and computers. Did you pay for your order online?” I did. Dude said, “I believe you. Tell me what kind of pizza you want, and I’ll throw it in for you right now. Did you order any sodas with it?” I told him I had ordered and paid for 4 cans of Diet Coke.
While he got to work on my mysterious order, I sat in the bar around a roaring fire pit they had going. I drank one of the Diet Cokes, and then I drank another—warm and comfy as all get-out. I wished Suzanne was there with me to enjoy the fire, and the music, and the smell that promised hot pizza was on its way. When the pizza was done and my own personal pizza guy was sending me on my way, I offered to pay for my order, but he was sure they’d find my order and payment somewhere in their temporarily downed online accounts. I handed him one of my tie-o-the-day.com bracelets and told him to contact me there if he didn’t get paid for my pizza. Dang, those TO’TD bracelets come in handy! Walking back to Hotel Lucia on the ice with the pizza was a bit tricky. You see, Pizza Slut makes only one size of pizza, and it is bigly: a 30-inch crust. That’s a heavy duty pizza pie to balance while sliding on ice. But both I and the pizza made it to the hotel without falling.🍕