Portland

We stayed just outside Portland last night and will stay just outside again tonight (on the other side), which bought us a full day to explore the City of Roses. What a day! Portland is a beautiful city with a lot of character, beautiful gardens and parks, interesting inhabitants, and delicious food! Where to begin?

Person:
While wandering downtown Portland, we came upon Pioneer Courthouse Square, which our guidebook assured us always had a protest or event of some kind happening. Well, it didn't fail us; there was a massive gathering of sand castle builders that were organized for some kind of charity (we gave a 10 dollar donation for the family to enter). There was a Bart Simpson sand castle, an Up sandcastle house complete with a ton of balloons, and a kids area for amateur sand castling. One of the larger sandcastles in the center collapsed while we were there, which was met by "aws" from the audience but great cheers and celebration from the team that had built it. I loved this kind of attitude, so that team of sand castle builders are my people of the day.

Place:
We went to the Eco-Trust Farmer's Market in Portland. It was a little bit of a walk from where we had parked, but Laurie had found out about it and it sounded fantastic. We really needed to stock up on produce and it would be a great way to see some of the local flair. Unfortunately, none of this actually happened since even though we were all convinced it was Thursday (the day on which the farmer's market occurs), it was actually Friday (the day on which the farmer's market decidedly does not occur). Ain't bein' on vacation grand?

Food:
This is not a single item, but rather the meal we had for breakfast. We went to a cafe and bakery that I had heard about on NPR called Crema, and it was fantastic! We had Spanish Iced Coffee (basically the same as Vietnamese iced coffee; made with sweetened condensed milk), a latte called Caramel Sutra, a mushroom and manchego biscuit, a breakfast turnover with egg, potato, and mushrooms, and some specially made peanut butter cookies for the dogs. This place wasn’t much to look at at first glance, but ended up being a delightful start to our day.