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Published: October 9th 2007
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070918 Portland Oregon
So much happened in Portland. I saw so many cool places and met hung out with some good people. The first night I was there I hung out with some people I work with. Portland is a place where a lot of co-workers live. Amber, Noah, Neil, Tamra, and I went to a couple of cool local bars and made we make it back to Amber and Noah’s despite a couple of misadventures with the Portland PD.
Monday after brushing off a slight hangover I made my way to PDX, the Portland International Airport to pick up Sara. Sara’s a girlfriend of mine from Phoenix that I met in the spring. Hanging out with Sara over the next week was such a great experience. She had lived in Portland for a while so we had some good adventures driving around going to places she had been before and seeing new things as well. Having Sara with me made me realize how much I missed home and I’m so excited to come back on the 26th of this month.
Sara’s friend Josh let us stay at his place for the week. Josh was a great host
and fun to hang out with. One night he invited some friends over and we ate fish that he caught in Alaska on a trip along with corn that he grew in his garden, it was all tasty!
One day Sara and I drove to Multnomah Falls, just outside of Portland. The falls are beautiful, the main falls are almost six hundred feet tall! They weren’t flowing very heavily, but they were gorgeous none the less. We followed a side trail that took us to another set of falls after about 2.5 miles.
The next day we wanted to go downtown to Powell’s bookstore, but the parking downtown is horrendous so we drove to a MAX station. MAX is Portland’s train system. It was only 5 buck to get a pass for the whole days which is less than it would have cost to park downtown all day anyway.
We made a stop at Washington park. The park is huge, it encompasses the Zoo, Japanese Friendship Gardens, Hoyt Arboretum, Rose Gardens, a Vietnam War memorial, and I’m sure many other things. The war memorial was serene and beautiful. You walk in along a colonnade of trees planted
by vets and their families. Following the path under a bridge you find yourself in a sort of grassy cul-de-sac that slopes up. The path begins to circle in a spiral up the hill and across the bridge. At the top of the hill along the ridge there are many stone memorials with the names of those Oregonians lost in the war under which year they were lost. There are also other little notes about what was happening in Oregon that year.
After the memorial we went to the Rose Gardens. Even though it was late in the season there were still many gorgeous roses in bloom. There were rows and rows of many different kinds of roses and other beautiful plants.
Although I had been in briefly before we spent a couple of hours in Powell’s. It’s a huge bookstore with multiple levels and just about any book you want, plus some you NEED, but didn’t know you needed. It was easily the biggest bookstore I’ve ever been in.
Another day we went on a hunt for Nutria. Sara was enamored with these ugly, but sort of cute, beaver like creatures that more resembled rats
the size of a small dog. They had webbed feet, rat-like tails, and carrot-orange teeth. They were definitely f-ugly, but were so cute when they would take a piece of bread right out of your outstretched hand tentatively. The baby’s were especially cute.
Another day Josh, Sara, and I took a daytrip to the Oregon coast to Cannon Beach. Along the beach are some huge rock outcroppings, one of which is called the Haystack for obvious reasons. We hung out on the beach for a while, waiting for the sunset so we could make a fire and make some smores. The sunset over the ocean was amazing. Last time I was at the Oregon coast it was rainy, which is nice in it’s own way, but it had been several years since I had seen an ocean sunset.
The next day the three of us went to Saturday Market, again taking MAX. This time we were armed with soda in cups, along with our favorite hard alcohol. We wandered the streets all day looking at the interesting art and people, taking a few minutes here and there to pop into an elevator and ride it up and down
Nutria
Ugly little ratlike-beaverlike rodents! just long enough to put more liquor in our cups. (No I’m not drinking that vodka straight through the straw…there is coke in there!)
Then after a nice dinner at Hobo’s restaurant (which was next to a gay/tranny bar, so there were some interesting customers) we took a tour of Portland’s Underground. The tour commentary was interesting, in the 1850’s men were “Shainghai’d” while drinking, which consisted of them being drugged then dropped into the basements of saloons and dragged to holding cells and ultimately being sold as creawslaves onto boats at the docks. Additional tales of slavery/prostitution using the same “tunnels” were told. Ultimately we wandered around the dimly lit, dusty basements of three buildings, nearly being suffocated with the heat because there were so many people cramped into so few low ceiling’d rooms.
We checked out a few more bars downtown, got a Vodoo Doughnut, and Sara got a tattoo on her left (?) wrist. Josh let me stay another night after Sara left, then I headed out on Monday for a two day drive to Colorado that somehow ended up taking four days.
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sara
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