Our trip to compete at the Portland Open Dance Competition was a whirlwind. Really, everything is right now. We’re preparing to compete at the Blackpool Dance Festival, the world’s largest, one of the longest-run, and most prestigious ballroom competition.
Anyway, we use Portland as a warm up comp for Blackpool. Most couples like to head over to England early. They take lessons with the judges, attend training camps, and compete in smaller competitions there. We used to do all of that, too, but a few years back we came to a realization. All of that hustling around in England before the majors made us lose focus in our dancing. So we decided on a new strategy. We are now staying home before the majors. It gives us the freedom and flexibility to train in our home studio and structure our practices the way we need. We lose a bit of exposure with this method, but we feel greater peace of mind.
However, we still need those practice comps. Enter Portland Open. This small competition takes place only a week after Emerald Ball, one of the largest competitions in the USA (you can read about our adventures at Emerald Ball here). It’s nice competing in front of a home crowd. Ok, we’re not from Portland, but the combined dance communities of Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland are still small enough that competing anywhere in the Pacific Northwest feels like home. We like it.
The Drive Down to Portland
We started our crazy day by waking up at 5am. Since we had students dancing during the Saturday daytime session, we needed to get down to Portland before their first dances. Simeon did his hair at home while I made breakfast. Then we packed and loaded everything – dog included! – into the car and we were off!
Another reason we started early was because we wanted to miss as much of the traffic as possible. It might have been a Saturday, but there is never any end to the traffic in Seattle. Luckily we were able to bypass most of it. We live in the outskirts of the Seattle Metropolitan, and there is a shortcut from our city that allows us to avoid some of the traffic hotspots.
We stopped at a Starbucks to walk Casper and grab a coffee. By 10am we were in Portland! Actually we made good time. We dropped off our things and gave Casper another walk before changing and heading down to the ballroom.
Portland Open Daytime Session
Simeon was dancing a solo presentation with one of his pro/am students, Gretchen. She loves doing solos. Gretchen has such an eclectic taste in music, which leads to a massive range of songs to choose from. This time she chose a song called “Chasing Marrekkesh”. It’s a great song! They did a mixture of Argentine Tango, Foxtrot, Paso Doble, and Samba! How incredible that they can mix so many dances into one show!
Three hours later, our preteen couple showed up. These two are so cute. They’re only 10 and 11 years old, but such good little dancers! They have so much potential and I can’t wait to see how they develop over the next few years.
Kai and Vlada, the preteen couple, danced four events: the Preteen Pre-Championship and the Championship Standard and Latin. They won all four. *shrug* Ya know, just sweeping the titles, there.
Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for all of Kai and Vlada’s events. I had to run upstairs and do a hairstyle for a friend of mine who danced the Professional Smooth that night. I make it sound like a drag. It wasn’t. Though doing hair and makeup is hard work, I really enjoy the diversion. Most of all, I enjoy watching my creations come to life. Not that I’m trying to toot my own horn or anything, but she had the best hair on the floor that night!
Portland Open Professional Events
I started getting myself ready around 5:00, with a call to UberEats of course. Bibimbap was on the dinner menu this time. Yum!
My hair, too, was a great success. I tried a new technique with my hairstyle this weekend and I really love how it turned out. I’ll be doing that in Blackpool for the Standard event. Unfortunately we didn’t dance Latin. I think due to the low number of couples entered, the organizer canceled the Professional Latin event. In one sense that was good, since I didn’t need to figure out what to do with my hair. But we were disappointed. We were really looking forward to dancing our Latin. And one of our teachers, Nadia Eftedal, was there to judge and watch! It would have been really nice to dance our Latin in front of her.
However, we still got to dance our Standard. Simeon wanted to go for it that night, so we pushed it hard. We weren’t worried about the result. But being that this was the last comp before Blackpool, we wanted to go full out so we could study the video after and pinpoint our weaknesses. It was a good thing we did. It gave us some really good feedback to use in our preparation.
We won all 5 dances. Yay! Though a small comp, it always feels good to win.
Goodbye and Goodnight, Portland
After we finished dancing, we ran upstairs to change into more appropriate clothes for the pro party. Although we had to drive back that night, we wanted to make sure to say hi to our friends and chat a bit with Nadia. We couldn’t exactly turn down the free food, either! The party had crepes! We love crepes!
It was after midnight by the time we had finished repacking, taken Casper for another walk, and climbed back into the car. The drive back was tough. We were both extremely tired. A couple of times, we stopped at rest areas to do some jumping jacks and take Casper out. Still, driving in the middle of the night means no traffic, and we made good time. At 4am, we finally climbed into bed for a 4 hour nap. Our main Latin coach, Boriana Deltcheva, was landing at 10:30 the next morning and we needed to be up by 8:00.
Still, we had a good day in Portland. 23 hours is a long day but it’s by no means the craziest thing we’ve done. We have our fair share of insane travel stories under our belts.
What are your crazy travel stories?
I’m sure you’ve done some pretty crazy things. Let me know by commenting below. I’d love to hear from you!
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