Breakfast in Bridgetown : The Definitive Guide to Portland's Favorite Meal

Where do you like to go for breakfast?

Everyone in Portland, Oregon has an answer to that question. And now Portland has the definitive guide to where we all like to go: Breakfast in Bridgetown, by Paul Gerald, author of the best-selling 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles of Portland.

Take a fun and informative trip to 95 places serving Portland's favorite meal. Learn where they are, what they're like, how their food is, who eats there, and most importantly, what kind of coffee they serve.

With helpful categories and handy lists, Breakfast in Bridgetown is a tour of Portland's breakfast scene, based on the idea that a city's soul shines through its breakfast restaurants. In other words: we describe, you dine.

I have always wanted to do interesting things, visit interesting places, meet interesting people, and then tell folks about them. As a teenager I found out that writers get paid for doing it, and my life s trajectory was set.

I started as a sports writer at the Southern Methodist University Daily Campus because I wanted to sit in the press box at football games. I also had a sports-desk job at the much-missed Dallas Times Herald for three wonderful years.

After college I screwed around and traveled for a few years, then retreated to my home town of Memphis and another fantastic sports-desk job at the Memphis Commercial Appeal. I also got hired at the weekly Memphis Flyer and wrote for every section of the paper: sports, news, book and film reviews, editorials, you name it. Good times!

And then in the mid-1990s I found the twin promised lands of freelance writing and travel writing. That was when I cut loose from the docks of life and set myself adrift; I ve held exactly one real job since. Along the way I have slaved for money in between writing gigs at various places: an amusement park, a temp agency, landscaping (briefly), restaurant kitchens (more briefly), Alaskan fishing boats, social service nonprofits, FedEx, and an insurance company -- yes, cubicle and all. Those are the jobs I can remember, anyway.

I moved to Oregon in 1996 because it's about four thousand times cooler than Memphis. I have written two hiking guidebooks, both published by Menasha Ridge Press of Birmingham, Alabama: 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles of Portland (third edition, 2007) and Day and Overnight Hikes on Oregon s Pacific Crest Trai l (first edition, 2007). I am in the process of revising Menasha's Best in Tent Camping: Oregon, which will be out in early 2009.

I published Breakfast in Bridgetown book myself, and more titles are on the way from Bacon and Eggs Press.

I would appreciate your buying this book because I really don t want to have any more jobs.