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Published: February 18th 2015
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Back in Portland for the second time and about to head south. We are hiring a car in a few hours and spending two days slowly winding our way down I-5 and 101 towards the Bay Area, California. The time we've spent in the Pacific NW has been varied but wonderful, matching easily the expectations in my mind built on a month-long visit here in 2006. Portland has changed a lot in the ensuing nine years, or so most people we have met here have said. The city is bigger, busier, more corporate. Its unofficial motto, "Keep Portland Weird", bares less relevance now than it did a decade ago or twenty or thirty years ago. Honestly I can't be 100% sure as my memories are hazy but certainly the skyline is a lot more jagged with tall office blocks than I recall.
Our first few days here were based around downtown. Though we stayed near Lake Oswego in a treehouse, much of our activity centred around Burnside and Powell's books. The days were windy and full of rain so it felt natural to snug up in Powell's Books' cafe. We visited a lot of Portland's vegan hotspots such as Sizzle
Pie, Voodoo Daddy Doughnuts, and of course Whole Foods where you can buy admittedly delicious salads for way over the odds in terms of price. Everyday Music on Burnside looked no different than it did on my last visit; it returned good memories of discovering for the first gothic folk musician Marissa Nadler amongst its boxes of CDs; I was drawn in by the black and white photograph of a distant woman standing amongst leafless trees that makes up her first album "Ballads of Living and Dying". I did not discover anything new this time. Unable to find a Couchsurfing host, we also spent a night in Portland's 24 hour coffee shop Southeast Grind (dropping into The Lovecraft Bar en route) and felt lucky that we had the money to sit in a cafe for 10 hours unlike many people sleeping on the streets that and every night.
Our return trip to Portland has been fairly brief, giving us just one full day. We visited Hawthorne Boulevard. It felt different from the last time I was there. Was there a Safeway and Starbucks on this largely independent street in 2006? At least the Third Eye Shoppe was still there,
though. After cocktails in the sun we walked to the vegan mini-mall, a collection of four shops that reminded me how big a market veganism has become. Food Fight! moved to a location closer to the centre and has been joined by Sweet Pea Bakery and clothes shop Herbivore. The difference in stock at Food Fight! - more glamourous packaging, far wider selections, greater focus on nutrition - illustratesbthe changing face of veganism in the past decade. The engine of capitalist recouperation splutters on.
Between Portland 1 and Portland 2, E and I spent five nights in Tacoma, Washington. Situated fairly close to Seattle, it is a port town that to some extent feels like a satellite settlement to Seattle but claims some autonomy with a great selection of museums and parks. We visited the Museum of Glass where the lady on the desk let us in for free and had the opportunity to see live a master glassblower working with the Museum's own team to create pieces of art. There was also a gallery of kids' designs where the team has almost perfectly recreated the drawings of 4 to 11 year olds in glass. Some of it was
pretty funny and some of it was just strange. Manida, the woman whose house we stayed in, driving, also gave us the opportunity to visit Mount Rainier and Point Defiance. The former is a beautifully snow-coated mountain that stands proud in the background of any photos of Tacoma and the latter is a large urban part filled with old growth forests of hemlocks and douglas firs. It was great to get away from the city and into some semblance of nature for a couple of days.
To travel from Tacoma down to Portland we tried hitchiking. We got a lift from Manida down to a suburb called Lakewood and stood by the on-ramp to the I-5 with a cardboard sign saying Portland. Though there for an hour and a half and being very aesthetically appealing with smiles and clean clothes we didn't get a lift. Maybe because it was President's Day and fewer cars were heading south or perhaps because too many people genuonely believe that hitchikers are "muggers, rapists, and serial killers" (as a website E read yesterday claimed). We did however get some great responses from drivers:
• A peace sign from an older couple that
definitely looked like they hitchiked when they were younger
• A horn from a trucker
• A sad look from a dog that probably would have given us a lift if it could drive
• The middle finger from some beanie-wearing youth
We ended up gettjng a bus back to Tacoma in order to catch the Greyhound down to Portland.
So now we are just waiting to go to the car rental office in order to pick up a car that we expect to sleep in for the next couple of nights. E will probabky do a lot of the driving but I hope to be able to do some myself. I hope we can visit Crater Lake and then head oceanward through Redwood forests before travelling south along the Pacific coastline. Of course if we see any hitchikers we will pick them up - or at least give them the middle finger.
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