As hurricane coverage wrapped up last week, I became more and more excited to take a few days off.

Many of the people I’d been talking to had been quite good-natured about having many of their belongings destroyed in a hurricane, and I would explain during interviews with affiliates that even though the Lord is trying to get me fired, it’s tough to see so many people who’ve lost everything.

So I went to Oregon.

​Each year, I schedule time off to attend the Pendleton Round-Up. The Pendleton Round-Up is one of the biggest outdoor rodeos in the world, where 50,000 people show up in a town of 15,000, get drunk and yell at bulls.

As soon as I walked off the plane, I was accosted by souvenir stands in the airport selling marionberry jelly. Then I stop at a local burger joint, where I’m accosted with marionberry shakes.

Listen to me: I lived in Oregon for four years, and I have no recollection of marionberries being a phenomenon every fall. I recall Marion Berry being a mayor of Washington DC, but I probably made myself look like a tourist by buying a marionberry shake at Burgerville and thinking, “This is just okay.”

I also stopped at Voodoo Doughnuts to take some pastry to my brethren in Hermiston. I ordered a few by name and then said, “Can I also get two of the Oreo/peanut butter? I don’t know the name of that one.”

The doughnutstress couldn’t have been more helpful, but I lived in Oregon for four years! How could I not have learned the official name, obviously, is the Old Dirty Bastard!? What am I, a tourist?!

​My first job was one town over from Pendleton, in Hermiston. We ran news in the mornings and during the noon hour, then classic country music the rest of the day.

I had started listening to some country music in college, but this is where I got introduced to real country music. The hard stuff. Toby Keith’s “How Do You Like Me, Now” was just a gateway drug. One day, the last song before our noon report was George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” That day, my tease was “Our top story… ah, who cares, we’re all gonna be dead some day. Now, here’s me weeping for the next 20 minutes.”

Off my associates and I went to a diner in historic Downtown Pendleton. At one point, and I’m not making this up, the national anthem started playing. No one seemed to understand why the national anthem was playing or where it was coming from, but everyone in the restaurant stood up and got silent.

​Then we all sat down and finished breakfast.

Then off we went to the Roundup. The arena was a few blocks away.

I’m not sure how the conversation went in this direction, but in the middle of a street packed with people wearing cowboy hats and boots, my group started talking about how something looked like hummus.

I, apparently, do not know what “hummus” is (frankly, it sounds made up), so one associate drew looks from the hat-clad ​crowd because, when I said, “What is that, snail eggs?” he yelled out, “That’s not hummus! That’s escargot!”

He was right to do it. But we looked like tourists.

We continued bringing great shame to members of the group who weren’t tourists even after we entered the arena.

At one point, I asked if the bulls get time and a half for working on Saturday. An associate suggested it’s almost as though bulls don’t want to have some dude sitting on their back, kicking it to get it honked off while they sit inside a pen.

In one case, the media horde had to scatter because the bull got too close. That led to a delightful exchange between the announcer and rodeo clown where the rodeo clown said, “Yeah, and we broke one guy’s shoulder a couple days ago.”

On the way back to Portland, part of the interstate was closed because of the wildfire, so I had to take side roads through the Cascades.

I suspect with the new version of It coming out, this was an elaborate scam by Stephen King to lure a reporter who has rolled his eyes at the amount of traffic around Mt. Hood into some sort of Shining situation.