PORTLAND, OREGON: JAPANESE AND CHINESE GARDENS

Portland has both a Japanese Garden and a Chinese Garden. My daughter and I thought we would only have time for one or the other, and so we read the descriptions and reviews of both gardens and tried to choose just one. They both got rave reviews, but as my daughter had lived in Japan twice, we opted for nostalgia and the Japanese Garden. The evening before we flew home, however, we discovered that our flight had been changed, giving us just enough time to add the Chinese Garden.

So which was better? Having been to both, I still can't make a recommendation of one over the other. 

THE JAPANESE GARDEN covers 5.5 acres in Portland's West Hills neighborhood, a nice break from the noise and commotion of the city, which is important as traditional Japanese gardens seek to unite the visitor with nature and provide a sense of peace and tranquility.

We visited the garden at the end of the day when there were very few other visitors, and it was definitely peaceful and tranquil.

PORTLAND, OREGON: MUSEUM OF ART

The Portland Art Museum, founded in 1892, is the oldest art museum on the West Coast and the seventh oldest in the United States. 

The sculpture garden surrounding the museum is worth a stop even if you don't have time to go inside.

Brushstrokes (1996) by Roy Lichtenstein

It was fun to see this piece by Allan Houser, an artist I had become acquainted with on a previous trip to the Oklahoma State Capitol:

                              Desert Harvest (1982) by Allan Houser

Hungarian artist and emigre Frederic Littman is credited with reviving the art of sculpture in Oregon in the 1940s:

Mistral No. 2 (1961) by Frederic Littman

PORTLAND, OREGON: COLUMBIA RIVER GORGE

One of the "must dos" for someone visiting Portland is a day exploring the Columbia River Gorge. The drive begins about twenty miles outside of Portland in the quaint town of Troutdale and cuts through the Cascade Mountains

Called "The King of Roads," the 75-mile-long Columbia River Scenic Byway was started in 1915 and took seven years to complete. It is considered a significant engineering feat. The man who was responsible for the project, Samuel C. Lancaster, worked hard to showcase the gorgeous waterfalls and views of the area without "marring what God had put there."

Our yellow Kia Tilly handled the hairpin curves and elevation changes just fine.

PORTLAND, OREGON: MORE TREATS AND EATS

My daughter is a food blogger. It's an important part of both the previous post about food carts and about this post about All the Stuff We Ate in Portland. I'm sure that if she weren't a food blogger, we would have eaten only fresh vegetables in reasonable quantities.

Whew! It's so nice to have an excuse for these food posts!

Lilly's Hummus
I'll start with a food destination that really, truly is all about healthy eating.  Rachael has done some photography for Lilly's Hummus, a wonderful home-grown business in Portland, and when she told the office she was going to be in Portland, they invited her to come see the factory, and I got to tag along.

Just about the first thing I noticed when we walked in was a seven-foot-tall poster of a darling little girl enjoying her hummus snack.  Hey! That sparkling face belongs to my grand-daughter, hummus connoisseur extraordinaire!  What fun!
We loved meeting Lilly herself. I was impressed to learn how her now national company began in her own kitchen as she made hummus to sell at a local farmers market. "People would get made when we sold out," she told us, so she started making more and more of her organic, locally-sourced hummus. Soon they had to move production to a small factory, and just recently they've moved into quite a large facility that we were able to tour.

PORTLAND FOOD CARTS

Portland has the most amazing food cart culture I have ever seen. We signed up for a food cart tour with Brett Burmeister, owner and managing editor of Food Carts Portland.   What a blast! The tour was a great introduction to the legendary Portland food cart scene. Brett gave us a great overview of the history of the food cart phenomenon and very specific insights into many of the carts that are in the Alder Street Food Cart Pod, the largest of the nine food cart gatherings in Portland, six of which are in the downtown area.

All told, there are over 600 food carts in Portland. They are carts--not trucks--a matter of semantics that has something to do with the fact that the law is that they must be able to be moved, and thus they must keep their wheels on, but they don't ever really move. The Alder Street pod has 65 carts, and most of them have been there for five years or more. 

It's no wonder that the last fast food chain left downtown Portland in the 1990s. Why would anyone eat at McDonald's when they could spend the same amount of money and eat here?  (Well, maybe so they could sit down, the single flaw of this food mecca.)

The food carts encircle a full city block (a parking lot) and part of a second block. They get their electricity through this mess of power lines tied to a single pole in the middle of the parking lot. 

PORTLAND, OREGON: AROUND TOWN

We started each day in Portland dealing with its infamous pea soup fog. Even the cars seemed to get swallowed up in this fog--except for Tilly. We were pretty happy about our sunshine-yellow Tillamook Kia.

Because we just happened to park next to it, the First Presbyterian Church, a building completed in 1890, was our first stop in downtown Portland.

The nice ladies at the front desk gave us a "visitor" badge and took us to the sanctuary. It has a rich brown wood vaulted ceiling that gives it a nice outdoors-y feel:

Their pipe organ at the front of the room is stunning:

PORTLAND, OREGON: GIRL TRIP!

Throughout our child-rearing years, my husband had opportunities to take the kids on special trips without me. When our two boys were young, my husband often used Spring Break to take them backpacking. I was teaching at a community college that did not have the same week off, and so I was never included, which was fine by me. I was glad the boys had something fun to do, and I think these are cherished childhood memories for them.

Even now that our boys are adults, their tradition of traveling with their dad to climb mountains has continued. For the last five years or so, the three of them have met up in Colorado for that purpose. Two years ago I went along for the first time, and last summer my daughter and granddaughters came too. (Unfortunately, our son-in-law was on a business trip in Japan.)

My husband has even had a daddy-daughter trip with our daughter. When she was sixteen and hard for him to relate to, he hit upon the idea of climbing Mt. Shasta together as a way of strengthening their relationship.  They trained together, and then just the two of them embarked on a great adventure that marked a turning point for both of them. 

This past summer one of my friends took her four daughters and her daughter-in-law on a girls-only trip to London. It looked like so much fun, and it made me start to think about my personal experiences with our kids. I decided it was time for some much-deserved Mom trips where I would take one of the kids to a place of their choice for a few days.