Winter's Chill: Portland
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During the Holidays, Tim and I decided to make plans to visit our daughter in Portland. She had started her first year of college and we had not been up to see her since we had dropped her, bags and baggage, to her dorm last Fall. So we picked a weekend and bought our tickets.....non-refundable of course. We thought February might be good. Portland is a pretty moderate climate. It might even be the beginning of Spring......we thought...
How naive......Portland decided to give us a show.....a winter adventure. It started with one of the scariest flights I have ever had.....the kind where everyone on board cheers and applauds with ecstatic relief when the pilot manages to fight through zero visibility cloud cover and teeth rattling turbulence for a 3 point landing. Thank you very much!
We picked the weekend that Portland experienced the worst snow storm in recent history. But we were not to be cowed by a little weather. We were going to walk and walk and find hot beverages and walk some more! We were here to have FUN damn it!
Portland is one of my favorite cities....very walkable, tons of shops, restaurants, very pretty parks, fantastic transit system, lots of things to do in the way of Farmer's Markets, outdoor events, street entertainers and lots of people watching opportunities.
This visit proved to be an eye opener. The few people we did see were cross country skiing through town....or the 911 respondents we called when we found a woman who had fallen on the icy sidewalk and had broken her wrist....or inside where rational people would be in weather like this! We did find many places to keep warm out of the weather: Powell's books (HUGE!!!), The Original (Best French toast EVER.), Mother's Bistro, Little Bird Bistro, and Irving Street Kitchen (you MUST go sometime! Excellent!) Honestly....we really did eat a lot on this trip. And I highly recommend all of the places we went!
It was quite an experience to see what is normally a bustling, active, outdoorsy city become such an eerily quiet place. .....but we were not disappointed. It was an experience we will never forget, and in all the good ways. We figure we will never have the opportunity to see Portland quite like this again. We came across people helping other people out, like the transit system guys who helped a homeless man with frostbite from the streetcar get to a hospital, and the two young men on their way to work who helped us get the lady who had fallen into a warm building to wait for the paramedics, and the guys from Mother's Bistro who erected a tent in front of their building to keep the snow off everyone waiting for a table inside. People were just looking out for each other. But maybe that is just how Portland is all of the time.
Tim and Maggie....in search of Portland....
