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Published: October 1st 2013
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Friday - September 27
th, 2013
It’s raining today. Not the weather shepherds would have predicted on witnessing the red sky we had last night. Still, it’s hard to be critical. We’ve had such good weather over all on this trip and can hardly expect 3 months of sunshine and blue skies.
It does change our plans a little though. We call in at the Mount St. Helens Visitor Centre at Silver Lake and immerse ourselves in the science of volcanoes and in particular the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. A display showing a chronology of events leading up to the volcanic blast on May 18, 1980 is particularly interesting.
It’s another hour on this road heading east if we want to get as close as possible to the mountain but the weather is such that we wouldn’t even see it let alone walk around and take pictures so we head straight for Portland instead, check in nice and early to our fabulous hotel and get out and explore.
The hotel is the Embassy Suites Hotel in downtown Portland (on SW Pine Street) and it feels a bit swish. (The boys are suitably impressed!).
We seem to negotiate a rate with the valet that sees him taking away our car for the same price as us parking it ourselves so we’re happy (if not a little confused).
The generous sized suite provides us with two rooms, which makes a pleasant change from the one room/two beds we had last night and will have again tomorrow night. And overall the price is very good. We’ve paid more in Canada certainly. Perhaps Portland isn’t quite the popular destination that Vancouver, BC is. (Not to be confused of course with the Vancouver, WA, that’s just across the Hood River from us, dividing the two states of Washington and Oregon).
Trying not to get too comfortable too quickly in our little oasis within this vast and (if I’m honest) slightly scary city we head out straight away only to loose each other in possibly the best book store in the world.
Powell’s City of Books is a book lover’s paradise, the largest used and new bookstore in the world. Located in downtown Portland and engulfing an entire city block, the City stocks more than a million new and used books. Nine colour coded rooms house
Lorikeet
Oregon Zoo, Portland over 3,500 different sections and used books are lined up alongside their new equivalent making the choice as to whether to buy new or used simple. You decide based on what you want to spend and how good the used edition is.
Steve and I frequently visited Portland when we lived in Vancouver all those years ago and it was primarily to visit Powells. We’d take an empty suitcase over the border and return with it filled with books.
Today, we leave Steve to wander for even longer (and purchase a Powell’s T-Shirt!) and then meet up again in one of the reception rooms of our vast hotel and enjoy the “Manager’s Reception”, complimentary drinks and snacks provided. The boys are thrilled with the old-fashioned popcorn maker. They happily scoop up lots of the fluffy white stuff into little cinema style paper bags and the hotel gains extra kudos.
I personally get to try a tasty little cocktail made with blackberry juice & gin while Steve enjoys a nice Shiraz. The boys help themselves to a variety of juice and coke. We like it here!
Despite filling ourselves with nuts and popcorn we later manage to
Lorikeet
Oregon Zoo, Portland polish off a very delicious Lebanese Meal one block down from the hotel called “Hibibi”. It’s the first time we’ve had a proper Lebanese meal with the boys and are thrilled to see them enjoy it so much.
September 28, 2013
Breakfast the next morning sees the hotel surpass itself! We are greeted with a huge variety of hot and cold items including a made to order omelette station! Probably best we are only here for the one night!
It’s a soggy morning so we borrow a few brollies and go explore Portland’s famous Saturday market. It’s not as big or as impressive as I was expecting so I wonder if we’ve come a bit early (although it is just gone 10am). We loop around the downtown area, taking in Pioneer Square and head back to our little oasis.
A bit of the sunshine we had in Seattle would no doubt help Portland but to be honest I’m not sure it would help that much. It’s not a terribly attractive or very congenial city. The homeless and crime problem doesn’t help and in the downtown area there’s nowhere especially pleasant to wander
Hippos
Oregon Zoo, Portland around with the exception of a few impressive older buildings.
The pouring rain is probably not helping (and it rains a lot in Portland!) but we wouldn’t have missed our visit for anything though (and not just because it’s en route to San Francisco).
Four things stand out; The Embassy Suites hotel, our lovely meal at the Lebanese restaurant. Powells is fantastic (I recommend any lover of books visit at least once in her or his life). And the fourth thing is Oregon Zoo, situated in Washington Park just a few minutes from the downtown area.
Once we’ve checked out of the hotel (and despite the rain) we spend several wonderful hours completely fascinated by the large selection of animals. Many of those that caught our attention were the animals we’d seen in the wild but could now see “up close and personal” such as the river otters and sea otters. We got to see just how large a beaver really is and enjoyed a wonderful view of a couple of lazy cougars just a sheet of glass between us and them.
The black bears looked a little depressed, raising the age old question, “should we
Lazy Cougar
Oregon Zoo, Portland have zoos at all?” but it gave us something to chat about with the boys. As with most zoos there’s a lot of conservation work going on and they seem to do a really good job at engaging and entertaining the animals. But of course you wonder if you’ve spent your money in helping to do what’s best for these animals or helping to prevent them living free in the wild?
Anyway, it was a great thing to do on a wet Saturday in Portland and we thoroughly enjoyed our visit.
It did however make us rather late leaving Portland and inevitable traffic (horribly familiar it would seem) combined with diabolical rain, delayed us further, thus we didn’t arrive in Grants Pass, our next destination, until quite late.
We checked into a great Best Western (Rogue River Inn) and immediately Matthew and I took ourselves off to the pool. Actually an outdoor one that I didn’t expect to be using when we booked it but it was great! Lovely and warm and even cosier when it started to rain again. The hot tub was as toasty hot as we’ve found them all on this trip – a
Sea Otter
Oregon Zoo, Portland good thing to do after a long road trip.
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