Road Trip!

Kinda, anyway.  We live a couple of hours from Portland, so sometimes we’ll drive up and make a day of it.  It’s close enough for a day trip, but far enough away that we always want to pack as much into that day as possible.

Farms and more farms

The drive up is actually pretty boring, although it was quite pretty on Saturday (it was a very sunny day).

You’ll have to excuse the weird things going on in that picture – I took it from inside the car, so things were sort of reflective (and the windows could probably use a wash).

So our first stop in Portland was Powell’s Books.  We sometimes adore Powell’s more than almost anything else, and other times get mildly frustrated because finding what you want can be a sort of hit-or-miss activity.  Plus, sometimes things end up costing more than we really want to pay.

However, at the end of the day, Powell’s is a used book store that takes up a whole city block (and that’s just one of its stores, too).  So really – what’s not to love?  I don’t think we’ve ever gone to Portland without a visit, unless the only time we spent there was at the airport.

It wasn’t the most successful trip for me (although I still found some stuff I wanted), although it was fun, and the fiancé found some really great books that he needs for work.  We also found this:

Vampires...who are also pirates!

According to Wikipedia, this is a series of books about two children who are separated and picked up by two very different types of ships.  And even though I wrote the caption before looking up what the heck these books were about, I was right – it refers to vampires who are also pirates.

The fiancé’s comment on this when he pointed it out to me is that this is taking capitalization on two trends – vampires and pirates – hilariously too far.

So, once we’d finished at Powell’s and had lunch, we left the city center and headed out towards the Japanese Garden.  Only…it was sunny.  And in Oregon, sunny days mean lots and lots of people going to any outdoor venue they can.  So finding a place to park the car in this part of Portland we’d never been to proved to be quite a challenge.

As it happens, the Japanese Garden is in a big park with a bunch of other stuff – we saw an arboretum, a rose garden, the Japanese garden, and some random archery field all in the same place.  By the time we found a parking spot, we were kind of wondering if we really wanted to go to the Japanese Garden, since it was pretty far away and costs $9.50 per person.  I think there’s a bus that shuttles people around the park, but I’m not positive about that.

Very retro.

Since we happened by chance to park right next to the zoo, and the fiancé (adorably) really loves zoos, we decided to go ahead and do that instead (even though it was $10.50 per person ).  The first part of it we went to was a section devoted to the Northwest, and the animals native to it.

It was actually a bit odd, as far as zoos go, because they’d landscaped it just like you’d expect anywhere else in Oregon.  Obviously, that was a conscious choice, since the section of the zoo was filled with animals you’re likely to find in western Oregon, but how many zoos do most people get to go to with towering trees and the overwhelming green that is an Oregon forest?

Either way, we got to see a couple of black bears, snow on the ground (!), a bald eagle, a rather entertaining owl that I couldn’t get a good picture of, and a beaver.  It was actually kind of funny – they had an exhibit with a couple of beavers and a bunch of ducks, all hanging out peacefully together.

(For those who are unaware, the two main schools in Oregon are the Oregon State Beavers and the University of Oregon Ducks.  When they play against each other during the football season, everyone refers to it as the “Civil War.”)

So here’s all these lovely Northwestern creatures:

A black bear.

Why is there snow in May?

Baldy McPatriotpants (kidding!)

The OSU mascot, or perhaps just a beaver.

For some reason, there were also a whole lot of “petting zoos” around.  There would be a fenced enclosure with goats, and you could reach in and pet them.  It was a little bit random, since they had some over by the giraffes as well as over in the Pacific Northwest area.

The goat is leaving!

The sad thing was, none of the goats liked the fiancé.  The poor thing would approach the fence, and they’d all turn away from him.  Poor, poor fiancé.

"Yeah, I'm on a barrel. Whatcha gonna do about it?"

There was also another goat in this area that was just hanging out on top of a barrel, for no reason.  It was kind of funny, mostly because it was so random.

Anyway, we actually saw some animals you might expect to encounter in Africa or Asia or other parts of the world, but I didn’t take as many pictures of them.  There were more people crowding around to see them, we were getting kind of tired by that point, and I just didn’t much feel like it.

Plus, I had to do my thing where I tell the fiancé repeatedly that no zoo can compare to going on safari in Kenya.  Because, you know, it can’t.   I’m such an obnoxious zoo-goer ever since that trip, because seriously, when you’ve seen elephants and lions and cheetas and gnu and zebra and gazelle up close and personal…it’s just not the same in a zoo.  Especially since, when one goes on safari, one is extremely excited by the gnu for about the first couple of hours.  Then one sees an elephant or something else that is vastly more entertaining than an ugly herd animal, and the gnu become boring.  Zebra are cool the first few times, and then you realize they don’t actually do anything.  So actually, by the time you’ve spent a few days doing very little besides looking at animals, a lot of them are quite dull in their natural habitat…which means they’re even less interesting in zoos.

Which, of course, makes me completely and utterly obnoxious.

Anyway, after we wore ourselves completely out at the zoo, we hopped on over to Washington Square Mall in Tigard (a suburb of Portland).  I once saw an online review for the biggest mall where I live, talking about how the reviewer had no idea how us plebes made do without the Washington Square Mall.  And it’s not a bad mall, as far as those things go…but it’s no Houston Galleria.  Some people are so silly.

But, the main point of going to that mall was to visit a Sephora, which I did.  I also looked at shoes at Nordstrom, because I need some wedding shoes (I didn’t find anything).  And then we packed ourselves back in the car and headed home.  I think I fell asleep about 30 minutes after I got back, because I was just that worn out.

Advertisement