Sunday, September 11, 2011 The Portland Experience

We’ve had a bit of shock for the last couple of days. We took off from Florence yesterday to go 175 miles to Portland. We sailed along without difficulties north on US-101 until we hit Lincoln City. My God, what a slowdown! We crawled along at about 5 miles per hour, purely because of the amount of traffic. We finally tuned east on OR-18 and sped up, only to slow down about 5 miles later. All in all, we lost about 75 minutes to heavy traffic. We got into our pretty RV park, east of Portland, only to find that the WiFi was lousy, we couldn’t get satellite reception and it was hot, with the western sun still blazing away on the Lazy Daze.

Tuesday was better. We changed to a better site in the RV park and headed into Portland proper. The first order of the day was to drop off Dave’s print to NewSpace, a Portland gallery that has included one of his works in its next show. Washington Park is one of Portland’s many parks, and we checked out the Rose Garden and the Japanese Garden. It was warm, but very peaceful. At one point we were looking at a waterfall in the Japanese Garden, watching couple after couple maneuvering in front of the picturesque waterfall. They noticed us watching and began to apologize for taking so long. The apparent tour director said “So sorry, bridal flight.” I guess it was a tour of newlyweds who all needed a romantic shot. The raked meditation garden was amazing; I don’t know how they do it.

After that, we were hungry, so we went up to trendy 23^rd Avenue and had a great lunch at the Rams Head. Dave is having fun trying out the local brews. After lunch, back to culture; we checked out a collection of specially printed artist’s books by Inge Bruggeman. Then, it was hot, we were tired, so we did a little grocery shopping and headed home, to munch potato chips and drink Cuba Libres in the shade of our Lazy Daze. The week should be interesting as the weather is expected to get into the high 90’s all week. This is not what we expected from Portland.

The next day we turned east to go down the Columbia Gorge Highway, replete with many waterfalls, hikes and state parks. It’s a windy road, with some pretzel turns here and there. The first stop is Crown Point Vista House, with a good view of the Columbia River. They had pictures of what the Gorge looked like with the autumn foliage going. Dave said the brilliant colors were oversaturated dry grasses and dead trees. We got a good tip from the information desk: get Udderly Chocolate ice cream at the Tillamook Cheese Factory. (That will be next week.)

The drive was perfect for the hot weather: drive in the air-conditioned car, find a waterfall, do a short hike to good viewpoint, photograph, return to air-conditioned car. Latourell Falls caught our attention for a while. Multnomah Falls was the highlight – 611-foot falls, supposedly the third highest in the U.S.  I’m pretty sure Yosemite Falls is highest, but I’m not sure of the second highest. We got in line to get an unimpeded view of the falls.

After Multnomah, we got on the Interstate and sped further east to the town of Mount Hood. The smoke wasn’t too bad there, but a big fire in the Mount Hood area was putting a lot of particulate matter in the air. We went to a couple of wineries and decided that Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir still aren’t our favorite grapes, but we found a couple of bottles we liked. Then we sped back home to our sweltering Lazy Daze.

Thursday was a city day again. We skipped breakfast at home to visit Voodoo Doughnuts (yes, kids, that is the proper way to spell donuts). Their menu of doughnuts lists about 30 or 40, and they utilize foodstuffs such as Coco Puffs, bacon, Fruit Loops, Oreos, marshmallows and peanut butter. Oh, and a selection of vegan doughnuts, of course. Dave had the Bacon Maple Bar, with maple frosting and bacon on top.  My Memphis Mafia was a little more complicated, basically an apple fritter with bananas, glaze, chocolate frosting, peanut butter, peanuts and chocolate chips. Oh my, they were good! Luckily, there wasn’t a line, which there often is. They sell buckets of day old pastry, and one lady did stride off to work (presumably) with her bucket.

We walked around downtown as the day grew hotter and retreated to the air-conditioned Portland Art Museum. Their temporary exhibit was wonderful old fancy cars. Men in shorts, khakis and suits swarmed around the autos, rhapsodizing about transportation. Once past that, the museum has nice variety of painting, old and new, and a good collection of native American arts and crafts. We had an alfresco lunch and judged the fashion consciousness of Portlanders – long, summery dresses and white khakis: good; mid-calf pants (aka pedal-pushers) and droopy shorts: bad.

Finally, we headed south of Portland to the Swan Island Dahlia Farm. August and September are the months for dahlias and they were at their peak, mindblowingly extravagant. It was very hot, but wonderful.

Friday was a quiet day. The highlight was going to dinner at the Riverview Restaurant, which true to its name, has a large deck right by the Sandy River. The evening air smelled of forest, the company was good, our dinners were great – a wonderful evening. There even was a piano player, playing somewhat hokey music, but it suited the ambiance. At one point, I noticed him leaving but the piano kept playing. It sounded like his style, so I wonder if he recorded his own music to play while he took a break.

We started our last outing in the city of Portland at Voodoo Doughnuts. I got Diablos Rex, a very chocolate doughnut; Dave got (pardon the language) an Old Dirty Bastard, with Oreo cookie bits and other unnatural things on top. This time there was a fairly long line, but everyone was amiable. The Portland Saturday market was right next to Voodoo, and so was a pretty good Prince imitator. After a few shots, we went looking for cherries, corn and other flora. Alas, the only fruit and vegetables were in smoothies or battered and fried.  So we moved on to other cultural activities. Powell Books, as advertised, must be the largest bookstore in the U.S. It’s divided into many rooms. The science fiction was in the Gold Room, and it was the largest collection of SciFi I’ve ever seen outside of a bookstore solely devoted to SciFi. I was impressed, but we bought a few books and moved on; it was getter hotter and hotter, in the mid-90’s. We checked out several art galleries in the northwest section of the city and I had the best fish sandwich in years at Fullers Coffee Shop, an old fashioned place with stools surrounding a W-shaped counter. We went home after that, closed all the windows and hatches, and reveled in air–conditioning the rest of the afternoon.

Today is 9/11 and it’s a shock to think that we were in New York ten years ago. It was a warm, beautiful fall day in mid-town Manhattan, and we saw the first tower collapse on television as we were eating breakfast in the hotel. What a terrible, helpless feeling. I finally managed to get through to the San Francisco Customhouse and found out that all of the Customs people in 6 World Trade Center, in the shadow of the towers, had gotten out safely. We spent a surreal day, watching disaster after disaster on television, realizing we weren’t going to fly out soon, extending our stay at the hotel, trying to give blood at a hospital that no survivors were coming to and finally, wandering around Central Park, watching fighter jets fly overhead.

Tomorrow we head to the northern Oregon Coast. I’m looking forward to cooler weather and lots of RV-cooked food at the 3-day Lazy Daze get-together in Nehalem Bay.

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