A Few Days Back in Civilization – Portland, Oregon

Oregon is a great state and I think I could move here. Portland is a fun and eclectic city and there was tons to do, see and eat there. Four days was not enough to see all there was to see and definitely not enough time to eat all there was to eat. We tried though! As the great band The Lulu Finders once said, “you gotta eat its important, I can’t stress that enough.” Food trucks are everywhere here and they are cranking out food that is equally delicious, yet no cheaper, to what you could get in a restaurant. We went to a good mix of both trucks and restaurants over the four days and every place was soooo good! In order to eat all of the things we usually just got one smallish thing at each place if we were planning on going food touring after. Some places we just had drinks. Some places we just pressed our faces against the glass and imagined what we would eat. So in no particular order, here is where we went:

Fresh Roll, Matts BBQ, Pine Street Biscuits, Apizza Scholls, Great Notion Brewery, Bollywood Theater, Pastrami Zombie, Little Big Burger, Sherpa Nirvana, Voodoo Donuts, Tin Shed Garden Cafe, and The Kennedy School. Hard to believe we ate five meals at our Airbnb!

I would recommend going to all of them…everything was excellent! On our final day we stopped at the Portland Mercado on the way out of town which had a main building with a few vendors and then the outside had more stalls and food trucks set up. It was all delicious Latin American food and we even got some fresh salsa, chips and marinated carne asada to bring camping with us.

Did we do anything in Portland beside eat? Yes…some…but not a lot. First to get our Portland street cred, we spend some time putting a bird on it. Once that was dealt with, we headed up into Forest Park which is right in the city for a hike. There were great views of the entire city from the top at the Pittock. The Pittocks published a Portland newspaper, the Oregonian back in the day. They got evicted because they kept throwing garbage down on the Portland peasants living below (or some other scandal, we didn’t actually do the tour).

We also went on an Underground Tour, but did not spend much time underground. The theme of the tour was to learn about the darker side of Portland and to learn some of the random lesser know tales, like that there is a vegan strip club and also a lumberjack strip club. The main tale was about a series of tunnels under the city used to steal and transport men to Shanghai. To our dismay, all of the tunnels are blocked off now, so what was supposed to be a highlight of the tour turned out to be hanging out in the basement of an old hotel. Much like hanging out in any basement.

According to our guide, being Shanghaied is a racist myth and in darker truth, a shady yet legal way to make good money. Overall though it was a interesting tour and we learned some new facts, like where to get good donuts.

In between all of the eating we managed to reorganize the van (another post in progress) and workout too so we earned the right to go to those 13 restaurants, right?

Portland gets two thumbs up! Fine holiday fun!