Portland, Oregon, is either the largest small town, or the smallest big city, and from the moment I got there I knew I was going to love this place more than I did Seattle. I think it’s the small town feel of the place that did it.
I stayed in the north-west district of the city, which is still mostly old style homes and relatively low buildings, though this is changing. Portland has a green barrier around the city and beyond that barrier it is illegal to construct anything new. As a result Portland is starting to grow vertically instead of horizontally. There are good and bad things about this barrier. The good being that the surrounding land remains as either farmland or nature, but the bad thing about this is that beautiful historic buildings are torn down and replaced by modern skyscrapers and apartments.
I took the bus to get to Portland and the Greyhound terminal in the eastern part of the Pearl district can only be described as homeless central. Portland has a lot of social services to help the homeless, which of course resulted in the homeless coming to Portland en masse. And they’re not the only ones, a lot of people are moving to Portland these days, much to the chagrin of the locals. Apparently there have been campaigns to paint Portland in a bad light in order to discourage people from moving there. Portlanders are also aggressively polite. Never before have so many people stopped to let me cross the street, even if there wasn’t technically a crossing. I may have found pedestrian heaven.
I stayed in a quiet and quite nice neighborhood in the north west part of town, with shops and eateries nearby, down 23rd avenue. A favorite of mine was a small Korean place with good cheap food, but the place I loved most in the city was Powell’s City of Books downtown, the largest independent bookstore in the world. It takes up a whole city block and it is amazing. On the top floor they have a special room with rare books. There are old works there, like the original Wizard of Oz books. Some books sell for 4,000 dollars!
Also on the western side of the city lies Washington Park, with a lovely rose garden that features just about all known variety of roses. Even with the warm weather the place was green and smelled great. Another place I liked, though part of me does feel the entree fee was a bit high, was the Japanese Garden. It was very well done, not too big and not too crowded either. The park was a great place to spend an afternoon.
I did two tours outside the city, one to the Columbia River Gorge and Mt. Hood and the other to the Oregon coastline (the northern part of it at least). The Gorge is impressive, from one of the vantage points you can see a long way and the distance distorts a lot. The river doesn’t look that wide, but at its widest point from where we stood it was actually two miles across. Lots of waterfalls on route to Mt. Hood and, close to where the landscape looked like the moon, we saw a rare natural phenomenon: a sunbow or solar halo. I’d never seen one before. The tour guide stopped the bus and we all took pictures. Then afterward the guide started telling us about what we were actually there to see, a rough moon-like landscape at the foot of Mount Hood.
Afterward we went up to the Timberline Lodge. From up there we had some great views of the mountain and surrounding area. The Lodge itself is beautiful and was used for the exterior shots of the hotel in the Shining. Nothing crazy happened while we were there though.
The second tour away from Portland went to the coastline of Oregon. I’d heard some amazing things about the coastline and it was beautiful indeed. I only got to see some of the northern part, between Cannon Beach and Astoria. I liked the rocky coastline, but I could have done without the visit to a museum at the end of it. There was just enough time to breeze through it, but not to see and read about everything. And if that’s the case you might as well skip the museum and spent some more time actually seeing nature sites. Oh well.
At some point I’ll have to come back and see the southern parts as well. It’s always fun when you’re on a trip and already you’re planning a return.
