Portland!

So I wanted to write about my Portland trip but didn’t think Facebook is too amenable to writing as much as I wanted to write.  Hence, my new Tumblr.

I decided last year I wanted to do a Portland vacation as a birthday/anniversary gift for Brock since he’s notoriously hard to find the right gift for.  He’s always wanted to go there and I love travelling, especially around this time of year, so it just worked out well.

Day 1:

Alarm went off at 5:30.  At the airport by 7:00.  Mani/pedi at the Minneapolis airport to break up a 4 hour layover.  Back on the plane and off to Portland.  When we get there, it’s raining and there is fog everywhere and I’m filled with a sense of dread/despair.  Hope it’s not like this all week or I might spend a significant amount of time in bed, weeping.

Get to the rental apartment (one unit in a converted Victorian) we found on VRBO.com - it’s lovely and right between two streets that have a ton of dining and stores, and only a mile and a half from downtown.  Off to dinner at Serrato, where I have the best damned baked mac and cheese of the trip, and Brock goes for an antelope leg, which is far less game-y than I’d imagined.  Back to the apartment to pass out.

Day 2:

So for some reason, my best friend, Lindsay, from when I was little and I quit talking after 10th grade.  I really don’t remember why, but we hadn’t talked to each other for almost a decade when she found me on Facebook.  Turns out she lives in Eugene now, which is just two hours south of Portland.  We rented a car and drove down to see her and her family for the day.  It was a lovely drive, and apparently a prodigious day for the formation of dust devils.

We met Mark, Lindsay’s husband, and her two kids, Markie and Lucy Jo and hung out at their place for a bit and had some lunch.  After that we dropped the kids off with Lindsay’s aunt and did some wine tasting at a few Eugene wineries and then stopped by Voodoo Doughnut Eugene to soak up some of that wine.*

It really was amazing to see Lindsay.  I have no idea why we quit talking (neither does she), but it was so good to reconnect.  We still get along so well and it felt like everything just fell back into place after a short break.  Now I’m just kind of bummed she lives so far away.

Still apparently wasn’t over jet lag and fell asleep on the way home within 10 minutes.  Repeatedly dreamed that Brock was falling asleep at the wheel and woke up hitting him, to his supreme delight.

*Oh right - I took the week off from sobriety.

Day 3:

Walked down to the Pearl district, about a mile or so from our place, and hit up Powell’s Books.  This place is insane.  The main building covers an entire city block over three stories, and they have a separate building just for their science section.  They have everything you can possibly imagine, including enough books to make stand alone sections in nautical fiction and marijuana horticulture.  I didn’t get anything, but it’s nice to know in the age of buying all your shit online (I know I sure do), there’s such a massive stand alone doing it old school, and doing it well.

We walked around the Pearl, Chinatown, and Old Town for a bit before we had a sailing tour of the Portland bridges.  It sounds weird to do a bridge tour, but since Portland is split down the middle by the Willamette river, there are 8 main bridges downtown connecting the two halves of the city.  My favorite fact I learned was when one of the bridges was built, it was considered so ugly the arts council sued the city, and was allowed input into the aesthetics of the next bridge - how very Portland.  The tour was in a tiny little sailboat and really relaxing, but being in the sun that long took it out of me.  

We explored the city a bit more and went to Deschutes Brewery to grab dinner and some beer since it’s the top rated brewery in Portland.  What a disappointment.  We got flights of all their different beers, and neither of us really liked anything.  I got to feeling really sick over the course of dinner so we left early and went back to the apartment to watch episodes of Portlandia.  If you are unfamiliar with Portland and are looking to dig into their culture, this is a good start.

Day 4:

Went to the Lan Su Chinese Garden, a little Chinese garden in Chinatown that takes up a city block.  

It was lovely there, and we stopped in for some tea/brunch at the teahouse.  They had a ton of teas and we weren’t sure what to get, so we went for the five tea flight - yes, tea flights.  Seems Portlanders will turn any beverage offerings into a flight if you’re indecisive.  There was quite the ceremony to it, and you were supposed to let each tea steep a few times for different amounts of time to taste the differences, and drink out of these tiny, tiny cups so you could just taste the essence.

Everything was exceptional save the last tea, a Puer, which tasted like armpits and desperation.  Of course this was the only one Brock decided to tweet about, which the garden tweeted back on, and we felt like assholes.  Whoops.

Next we did a Portland bus tour.  Portland isn’t a real big tourist town and doesn’t really have many real touristy attractions, so there wasn’t a whole lot to it, but it was a good way to get a down and dirty overview of the city.  We decided to stop at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) to see the museum and also check out the submarine they had that you could tour.  If you’re ever in Portland, do yourself a favor and skip the OMSI.  This was by far the shittiest museum I have ever been to (terrible exhibits, half the exhibits closed, hasn’t been updated since the 70s), and you can buy the sub tour separately, which I’d recommend.  The sub was really cool - I do not consider myself a claustrophobic person, but I was feeling a bit hemmed in there in a tour group of 15 people, and there used to be 77 guys on that ship.  I can’t imagine being in there for months on end.  I would have commenced a complete nervous breakdown within 12 hours if locked in there on duty, and was really glad when they said the tour was coming to an end.

After catching the next tour bus back into the city, we stopped by Bridgeport Brewpub for dinner and beer.  This place was amazing.  Their first plus was they allow puppies on their outside patio.  Because by this point I was missing Lola May, that was a huge bonus.  More importantly, the food was good, and most importantly, the beer was wonderful.  Brock really liked their Summer Squeeze, but I am in love with their Blue Heron pale ale.  We ended up stopping back in a few times the remainder of the trip just so I could have another pint or two - it might just be that I haven’t drank more than a handful of times the past four years, but it was phenomenal to me.

Day 5:

Breakfast at Kornblatt’s Deli, right around the corner from the apartment, then off to the Japanese Garden.  As much as I liked the Lan Su Garden, this was even better.  It really did remind me of a lot of the gardens in Japan and made me really miss that summer there, but also helped clear my mind of all the stress and bullshit I was still carrying with me from home.  If you’re in Portland, I’d highly recommend you pop in for a visit - it really was one of my favorite parts of the city.

After this we headed down to the rose garden, which while not really my thing, was still really pretty, especially for so late in the summer.  My big question here is where they come up with some of these terrible, terrible names for colors (Doctor Dick?  Pope John Paul II?  Seriously?).  I wish they’d set me loose in there next spring so I could rename them, although you’d probably end up with a lot of David Bowie references at that point.

We weren’t sure what we wanted to do with our afternoon at that point, so the logical conclusion was to head down to Voodoo Doughnut.  This place is amazing, period.

We walked around downtown for a bit and stopped back in at Bridgeport for a quick beer, and then Brock went to Powell’s and I went for a lomi lomi massage at Kanani Pearl since I’ve always wanted to try that massage modality and there are zero practitioners in DC.  It was absolutely delightful, although it’s difficult for me to separate out the modality from the therapist sometimes, since you can have five practitioners do the same type of massage five completely different ways.

We had dinner at Urban Fondue, which was one of the best meals we had during the vacation.  I really wish we had a fondue restaurant of this quality in DC.

Day 6:

Slept in, grabbed some lunch at Red Onion, and then went on a bike tour of downtown Portland with Pedal Bike Tours.  This was actually the first LivingSocial voucher I bought for our vacation all the way back in December of 2010.  The first part of the tour mostly had stuff that we had already checked out earlier in the week, but the second half hit a bunch of stuff we hadn’t gotten to yet, including Portland State and the waterfront park east of the river.  We also learned a very net trick with these four spout water fountains that are all over the city: if you and a friend each put your thumbs over two of the spouts, it can turn into a really juvenile water fight, especially if you attempt in front of your bicycle tour group.

Overall a wonderful afternoon.  We had really great guides who knew a ton about the city and it was nice to be able to bike around such a bike-friendly city.

Back to Voodoo Doughnut, then on to Bridgeport to indulge my Blue Heron cravings.

Day 7:

Slept in again, and then wandered around downtown.  Passed Michael Ian Black on the street, so we looked into it and bought tickets for his show later that night.  Grabbed lunch at Higgins and hung out on PSU’s campus for a few hours and read some of the books Brock bought at Powell’s earlier in the week.  One last trip to Voodoo, then slowly made our way back to our neighborhood for dinner at Northwest Public House.  Grabbed the bus over to east Portland for the Michael Ian Black show, which was hilarious.

Day 8:

One last trip to Kornblatt’s, and we were off.  Got to PDX via light rail, where we met the craziest woman in all of Portland (which is saying a lot), and I’m sure this is the type of loon conservatives picture in their minds eye when they talk about the hippies in the peace movement.  Take every flower child peacenik stereotype you have, add on 40 years, subtract adequate psychiatric counseling, and multiply by 10.  Interesting trip.

Landed in Dulles by way of Salt Lake City, and were escorted to the terminal in a people mover that literally looked like a death camp on wheels.  Not too happy to have to get back to real life, but when we crossed the bridge from Virginia into DC and I could see all the monuments lit up and the city laid out in front of us and the thought of a puppy anxiously waiting to see me, I was happy to be home.

Some general thoughts on Portland:

*No one seems to have a job there.  People just hang out all day.  I think I saw less than half a dozen people in suits the entire time I was there.

*Related, there are a ton of homeless people.  But they’re not homeless like DC people are homeless - they don’t beg and just seem to hang out.  Like everyone else in Portland.

*Related, there were a lot of homeless kids (and dogs), which was troubling.

*People are disturbingly nice.  The first day we were there, we had to get across the street at an intersection and there was no stop for oncoming traffic.  Everyone just stopped and let us cross anyway.  We thought it was a fluke of random niceness, but people did this throughout the trip.  No matter how much we saw it, it kind of freaked us out.  Everyone was unbelieveably friendly and genuinely nice in a way I’m utterly unused to in DC.

*All the stereotypes you have about Portland being a bunch of bicycle-loving, environmentally-friendly, progressive leftist vegan lumberjacks is pretty much true.  On the buses, instead of a fare for seniors there was a fare for “honored citizens”.  Now I consider myself a progressive liberal too, but that was too much even for me and I involuntarily threw up in my mouth a little.

*People are high on drugs I have never seen in my whole sheltered life.  Now I’ve seen my share of drunks and stoners, but there were some people on hardcore shit.  We saw a guy with eyes rolled back on his skull stumble and nut himself with considerable force right on a bike rack.  He proceeded like nothing had happened.

*Everyone in Portland has a tattoo.  And not little ones you can hide and are pretty conservative, but the big, bold tattoos from the ’90s that you laugh at when you see now.  I’m pretty sure you have to show proof of tattoo prior to signing a lease within city boundaries.  If for no other reason, I could never live in Portland because of this.  The tattoo I have is in the process of coming off, and I could never do it again.  

*Portland is super white.  I have never been in a city this white in my life.  Now before you start thinking “Huh.  So that’s what a white city would look like,” be careful, because instead of this:

you might get this:

But either way you’re riding a bike.