A Little Bit of This and a Little Bit of That . .: Up the West Coast - Day 8 - 8/30/12

Arriving to Portland, Oregon

We had breakfast at the hotel, it was included and was not bad at all with hot food instead of just continental cold breakfast. After that we headed up north on I-5 towards Portland. I-5 is on the Willamette Valley with the Coastal Range on the west side and another range of mountains on the east. The whole valley seems to be a big farming area, at least till closer to Portland. We were able to see Mt. Hood once we got further up north. It was overcast so we couldn't get a good picture of it.

Willamette Valley

After arriving to the city we found our hotel and checked in. We stayed that night at the Marriott in downtown. Marriott is a nice hotel chain but what bugs us about it is that they nickel and dime you for everything and you already pay a lot of money to stay there, same goes with most of the bigger name hotel that are "fancy". You have to pay for the internet, well it is free if you go to the lobby or the bar area. You also have to pay a lot for parking. And there are no meals included. Most of the cheaper hotel it's all included and they are still nice hotels, like the Holiday Inn Express in Eugene/Springfield.

View from our room

Soon after that we started to look for a place to have lunch. Jeff had found some more restaurants that have been in some TV show's. Bunk Sandwiches sounded good, and they had one fairly near to the hotel. It still took us awhile to find it. The sandwiches we had were good, but nothing too extraordinary. I think that the Newtown General Store's sandwiches are as good if not better than those. So what do we learn from this, it's really not worth trying places that have been in some TV shows. They are no better than some other places. One interesting thing in this city are the Benson Bubblers. They are drinking fountains that were installed in the early 1900's by Simon Benson. He was trying to keep the workers from going the saloons and bars by providing them with fresh water.

Bunk Sandwiches sandwich

One of the Benson Bubblers

After lunch we went for a walk by the river on the waterfront park. Then we thought that some doughnuts would be good and since there is a place called Voodoo Doughnuts that also has been featured on one of the Food TV shows. Their name to fame are all these weird toppings and flavors. We found it, but the line for buying them was huge and we didn't want to wait. Then we headed to the shopping area and passed a few other parks along the way.

The Battleship Oregon Memorial

Park on SW Ankeny St.

Voodoo Doughnuts

Skidmore Fountain

Maritime Museum Boat Exhibit

South Park area

Courthouse

Director's Park

An interesting store window

"Golden" door

Portland is a nice, very walk-able city. There are couple of thing that did bother me. There seems to be a lot of homeless looking people. They sort of look like hippies, are mostly young, around collage age. I'm not sure if they are homeless or just look like it, but some of them did have a lot of stuff around them and they looked a bit dirty. Lots of them also had dogs with them and many of them were pitbulls. Also as we found out around dinner time, that the downtown business area doesn't really have too many restaurants. We did find one and the waitress said that most of the restaurants are in different neighborhoods. There were lots cafes, which were closed by dinner time and lots of "food trucks/carts" for a lack of better word. Some of those were still open later in the early evening. I think most of those trucks were ethnic food. There seem to be several places for them and they were very busy at lunch time. We ended up having dinner at the Pazzo Ristorante.