Day 9

Our final day in Portland.
We were anxious to try Flavour Spot, which is a street cart that sells waffles. But they're not just waffles. They are fresh, fluffy, hot waffles, made into tacos with yummy things inside. So we both had one with sausage and maple spread. We are on vacation, after all.

And finally we made it to Stumptown Coffee, which is famous here for being local, roasting weekly in small batches, and I think also being sustainable and green and fair and probably organic, too. It was good. They serve coffee from french presses. We watched them make a big pot of coffee by pouring three large french presses into the pot. Isn't that cool? I've never been to a coffee shop that uses only french presses to make their normal "drip" coffee.
We are ever deeper engrossed in The Passage, so we spent most of the day reading it, in the park. It's weird, but I swear there aren't as many bugs here. We sat in the grass for hours without seeing a single ant.
More daycare ducklings. They are so cute.

Today was a food cart day for us, so for lunch we tried some different ones.
They are so brilliant to have these in a city like this. Apparently the cart owners rent semi-permanent parking spaces on the exterior edges of a few parking lots down-town. Their overhead is low, so they can afford to sell their food cheap--and there are all kinds! Thai, Mexican, Greek, Celtic, Lebanese, BBQ, Burgers, Soups, Espresso. I had Pad Thai, and Daniel had Quesadillas. This is what $5 buys you at one of these places. I asked Daniel how he thought they passed health/safety inspections, and he said he didn't think they could. Don't know anything about that, but the food was good.

We cruised on The Spirit of Portland for about 2 hours this afternoon, enjoying the scenes up and down the Willamette River. It has been such a fun vacation. We are sad to be leaving, but I'm also looking forward to going back to normalcy!

Day 8

We had heard from several people about Mother's Bar and Bistro. It is a fantastic restaurant downtown that serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner--and it's based on recipes from different mothers around the world. Thank goodness we split our meal--it was huge. If mothers around the world were daily serving their kids what we ate this morning, the obesity rate would be even higher. It was delicious.

Today: a full day of winery tours! Wowsa.
Oregon has over 400 wineries, and that is a lot! Texas has less than half that.The first winery we went to provided an awesome tour, with fairly in-depth explanations of the wine-making process.The tour included Daniel and me, an older couple named Carol and Denny, and their son Dylan and his wife, Elle. They were such a talkative, friendly group that we ended up sitting with them for lunch, chatting about politics, health care, each others' careers. They were from Iowa. So fun to talk with Americans from different parts of the country. This shot was Carol's idea. Don't the grapes look tiny? They'll harvest them in about 1-2 months. Carol and Denny just got back from a 2-week trip to Europe, and they apparently spent some time in the French wine country. Maybe in France it's all wine country. I wouldn't know. But it made me feel better about never having been there when Denny said it looks exactly like this.

Day 7

I had worried that a walking tour of the city would be all old news by day 7 of our time here--but we learned so much! It was very fun and informative and tiring!
This is Mill Ends Park, the smallest city park in the world. Funny, huh? And this is a solar-powered trash compacter that signals the routing station when it's full. Like it's from the future or something! Apparently the city of Portland was named after Portland, Maine--from which many of the original settlers came. "Boston" was another possible name for this city, but they flipped a coin--and "Portland" won. Have you seen a building like this whose windows open? We thought that was cool.
And these are especially cool. They are drinking fountains, but they call them "Benson Bubblers," after Simon Benson, who was instrumental in Portland's early construction. They run clean water from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., 365 days/year. There are about 50 of them around town.This is what daycare looks like in the urban setting. We saw about 4 groups of pre-schoolers like this, walking toward the big city park and around town.
We've seen this drummer twice around town. Recycling paint buckets has never seemed so cool.

We ate at a great cafe for lunch.

Today we said goodbye to the B&B and hello to The Nines! Beautiful! So swanky. So fun. Tomorrow to the wineries!

Day 6

We had a nice, easy day today. The weather was a little cooler, which helped.
We're enjoying a book, The Passage, which we're not far enough into for me to recommend, but which seems promising as a suspense novel. It is so nice just sitting outside, under a tree, enjoying a book or a good crochet project. It is, in some ways, so reminiscent of my summer in Mexico City--except this time everyone is emotionally stable and happy--and Daniel is here--which is much better than the summer in Mexico City. Anyways. Check out the size of this tree!
We visited the experimental rose garden, which is right next to the Japanese garden on the west side of town. So many different colors and variations of roses--you can't imagine. Beautiful, colorful, and fragrant--we really enjoyed it. The bus driver who transported us to and from the rose garden was as much tour-guide as bus-driver. It was so neat! He's the only one we've encountered that just volunteers random facts about the things we're passing. He seemed to enjoy providing that, and we enjoyed hearing it!

I have to add this. One of the B&B owners is a really delightful, personable conversationalist named Dusty--and we didn't meet him until tonight. He went on and on and ON about Daniel's obvious, God-given, naturally magnificent voice, and how he was shocked no one so far had insisted that he give voice-overs a serious consideration. He must have brought it up 5 times in the course of a 20-minute conversation, and he didn't seem to be intoxicated. In fact, he used to own a theater in San Francisco. So now Daniel's thinking about it. He does have a great voice--I agree with him on that.