Today was the day we learned what an awesome city Portland is.
Our first stop was the oh so popular doughnut shop, Voodoo Doughnut. Not a person we know who has spent time here has not recommended it. The choices were overwhelming, but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t go wrong. We ended up sharing a variety of six, each fabulous. Once our bellies were full, we definitely needed to get a lot of steps in to feel more balanced, so we hit the pavement. We spent the rest of the morning in downtown Portland checking out the shops. Ellie bought a cute bracelet in one and we all eyed many other treasures in the boutiques.
Powell’s Bookstore seemed to call us back and we spent at least an hour in there again. We even obtained passes to the rare book room and got to see a plethora of first edition books. My favorite was one of the few surviving copies of the first edition of the Lewis and Clark journals. I have a much more recent edition in my classroom library, but it’s a really hard sell with my students. Maybe I should have splurged on the $25,000 for this copy. I’m sure that would garner interest.
I’ll let the others tell you about lunch today. I will note that I was disappointed. With all the amazing food options in my Portland, I wish we hadn’t chosen the one we did.
Since we’re always on the lookout for a NPS site, we went to the McLauglin House National Historic Site in nearby Oregon City. McLauglin is considered the grandfather of Oregon and he did have an interesting life.
Once we made it back to proper Portland, we checked into the Kimpton Hotel Vintage and wow, were were taken by surprise. They kindly upgraded us to a comically large suite. There are two floors, two bathrooms, legit bedrooms, and more square feet in this room than in our house. Oh, Kimpton, you always have something up your sleeve for us.
We listened to a live band at wine hour and the girls played table shuffleboard and Wii in the game room. The girls opted to choose local delicacies from the endless options of food trucks nearby. Zak and I tucked the girls in, told them they could watch as much Parks and Recs as they wanted, and headed to dinner at the Kimpton restaurant, Il Solito. It was a fun little date night with great food.
Today I learned that Portland is all about the food! My kind of city!
