Portlandia!

The past ten days have been a fun and interesting mix of adventures in both civilized and wild environments: visiting friends in the city, hiking through the rain forest, lake kayaking, wading in tide pools and hiking up sub-alpine meadows with deer and marmots. Don't worry, we won't try to cram it all into one post, so stay tuned for more!

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Our first stop after the coast was in Corvallis, where our most generous hosts, Summer and David, put us up for the night. It was really lovely getting to know them and their kids better and sharing a delicious home cooked meal of enchiladas and beans. (Thank you Summer for the enchilada tips! Potatoes and sour cream are crucial additions to the recipe :)

From Corvallis, we headed north to...

We spent four awesome days in Portland, visiting our friend David and falling in love with the city and surrounding countryside. David was also a fantastic host, doing his best to take us to beautiful and interesting places. The first night there, he took us out to the most unbelievably good restaurant called Pok Pok that serves Thai "street food." We shared a half dozen dishes, sampling as much as we could, including crispy fried whole talapia, boar's collar, flank steak salad, curry soup, and spicy chicken wings. Each was served with a dipping sauce or dressing that was loaded with fresh herbs and vegetables. It was, quite honestly, the best food I've ever eaten. Period. If you go to PDX, you must eat there. We didn't get pictures, unfortunately, but we did get shots of our brunch a couple days later at a Swedish diner called Broder.

I won't spend as much time describing all of the fantastic foods we had there. Let me just say that baked eggs, smoked trout, and potato pancakes are the perfect food for a cool, rainy Sunday morning. Those of you who know me well will know how happy I am with my lovely little tea spread to start the day:

Earl gray, honey, and warm milk

We also got the chance to sample one of Portland's famous food carts, which are to be found all over the city in a fashion highly reminiscent of Latin America. For lunch one day, we met up with our friend Beth, who is from Portland and currently doing an internship there. We had yummy Indian food from a cart she said had been around for some fifteen years and she had a Vietnamese sandwich from another a few doors down. We also ran across a big farmer's market in the main square and were amazed by the selection of fresh veggies, breads, flowers, and more.

Food Carts

The wonderful food was certainly one of the highlights of Portland. We were especially spoiled by the berry bushes growing in David's back yard. Every chance we got, we ate fresh, ripe raspberries by the handful right off the bush.

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On Saturday, after a morning of seeing the sights in the city (mainly Powells Bookstore!), we headed to the big Highland Games to see David perform with the Portland Metro pipeband. We got to see some great bands and had perfect weather for a field day.


On Monday, we visited the Rose Gardens in Forest Park. It was the most extensive rose collection either of us have ever seen and we spent at least an hour wandering around and looking at (and smelling) the beautiful flowers.

It was huge. This is just one half of one of the four levels on the hill


As we were walking through Forest Park, we ran into this giant crafted from roots:


On the way home we passed the old gates to Chinatown:

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STAY TUNED for the Columbia River Gorge...