Portlandia

About a week after we arrived on the Oregon coast, I headed inland to Salem and the Willamette Valley, for a further adventure north in Portland with my sister Amy and my niece Jesse. We were picking up my brother-in-law Rob, who was returning from a stay in Cincinnati, but we all took the afternoon off and we wandered around the city before it was time to pick him up at PDX.

Amy and Jesse in the big city

We parked and went into a coffee shop nearby for hot beverages to sustain us (this is Portland, after all), and then we wandered to various shops and passed by Pioneer Square (which appeared to be under construction). It honors the pioneers who founded Stumptown, as Portland was originally named. Among the pioneers were Terwilliger, Lovejoy, Couch, and to my surprise, Flanders. I knew there was a Flanders Street in the city, but I did not know that Captain George Flanders was one of the early settlers. I’ll have to ask Mike’s cousin the genealogist to see if there is a connection to the Flanders of Martha’s Vineyard.

There is a salmon sculpture swimming through
a building on a corner of Flanders Street

There were some weirdly interesting shops in downtown Portland; Sp Ace Camp (and that is how it was on the sign) had tarot cards with people like Prince, David Bowie, Willie Nelson, Amy Winehouse, and others on them that were intriguing, but I decided I’d rather not know what the future holds.

Another shop, I forget its name, sold ceramic coffee filters, pleated skirts, amusing stickers, and weirdly flavored candy. We didn’t buy any coffee filters or skirts, but the other items did get our attention. One shop—or was it a museum?—had some interesting items in the windows, stuffed bell bottom sculptures and an animatronic gremlin.

Bell bottom blue jean sculptures and an animatronic gremlin in a shop window

There was a minimalist cosmetic shop and a maximalist resale shop or two, plus of course, the main reason to come to downtown Portland, Powell Books. Full disclosure, we actually went there first, right after our coffee, because we knew we’d spend a lot of time there. Which we did, wandering around and running into each other, usually in the sci-fi room, but after piling up books and then unshopping a bit, we got in the long, long line to check out. Powell’s is a very pleasant place to spend a few hours, and it always makes my heart soar to see how many people are there, browsing and buying books.

The bookshelves never end at Powell’s Books in Portland

After we’d seen enough shops in downtown Portland, we headed out toward the airport, where there are—not surprisingly—a number of restaurants and shops, including the Portland Ikea. We had salads for dinner, and then worked our way down a line of shops to Ikea, where we stayed until they closed up shop at 9:00 pm, with still an hour or so to go until we were supposed to pick up Rob. So we headed to another restaurant, Famous Dave’s BBQ, and had some of the best bread pudding I’ve ever eaten. Very yummy.

Our day in Portland ended in the slow line to Arrivals at PDX, where we eventually spotted Rob and got his luggage wedged into the trunk of the car along with all our books and other purchases. By this time it was almost 11 o’clock at night, so we were glad the youngest person in the car was driving, and we headed around ring road 205 to its intersection with I-5. We made a quick stop at a rest area, and I was a minor hero by finding a toy some kids had left in the rest room and returning it to them before they left the parking lot. I found them because I had noticed their mother looked like Amy Winehouse, and though it was dark, I still managed to recognize her at the wheel of her truck.

We were home by midnight, and I slept on the foldout couch, very soundly. The next morning Amy made delicious scones (they were blueberry, and I did not mention that she brought me spice cake scones for my birthday, in lieu of my usual spice cake birthday cake, and now spice cake scones are my absolute favorite, but her blueberry scones are pretty darn good, too.)

After breakfast, we wandered around to a few estate sales in Salem, including one outside of town and up on a hill that had a beautiful view of the Willamette Valley and hills and mountains beyond. It was a weird house, though; the front door led into the bedroom and the kitchen was upstairs, but the sink was in another room. It had quite an amazing bathroom, though. Always interesting to wander around people’s houses at estate sales.

A big wild bathroom in a house outside Salem, Oregon

Then I headed back to Depoe Bay, and when I was about halfway there, I stopped at a fruit stand for strawberries, and luckily the lady at the stand told me that the road was closed a couple of miles down the way because there had been a serious accident. I could not believe it. The same thing happened to me going from Depoe Bay to Salem last summer, and I knew the detour, if you could call it that, meant I had to drive about 30 miles out of my way to a little town called Hebo, almost to Tillamook, where I could then pick up the Pacific Coast Highway and eventually get to Lincoln City and then to Depoe Bay. The alternate road is a windy narrow country road that is pretty sticky even at 35 mph, so it adds at least an hour to the trip. So I backtracked to where I could pick up the detour and wandered down to the coast, stopping at Neskowin just because I needed to stop after that long windy road. Eventually I got back to Depoe Bay, more than an hour after I expected to do so, and I swear I am not going to drive to or from Salem on a Saturday again, because that is apparently when the crazy drivers who pass on blind curves are on the road.

Neskowin is a small town of cottages and a nice place for
a rest stop when you have to take the detour to the coast.