Garden Tours & Last Day In Portland

We were quite shocked to wake up this morning to a completely blue sky with bright sun! Apparently, it's going to be in the high 30s over the next week so we are driving into hot, sunny weather for the rest of our journey.

Our plan today was to go back into Portland to visit the Japanese Garden. It is said that this is the most authentic Japanese Garden outside of Japan. As usual for us, we arrived soon after opening to be there in less crowded conditions. I've always thought it would be very interesting to go to Japan and today's experience only confirmed that. We spent our visit in a very calm and relaxing series of beautifully manicured gardens. Not many words are really necessary to show what it was like.

 In the same area there was a giant rose garden that had been in place since the 1930s. There are over 8000 types of roses. 

We wanted to walk around in downtown Portland another time so we set off for the Saturday Market which was also open on Sunday. They have a saying here that goes, "Keep Portland Weird". We found out pretty much what they're talking about. The market is a very large collection of stands or booths that run from the riverfront and up a couple of blocks. There were stands with clothing, jewelry, wood working, art and crafty things. There was also another collection of food carts. It was very eclectic.

I think that maybe we didn't spend as much time in the market as Marilyn would have liked! We ended up exploring the downtown area which, on a Sunday, was much quieter. The food cart area that we had visited on Friday had only about 1/3 of the carts open. No problem as we found another cart that has been on Eat Street. It was called The Dump Truck and it served Asian style dumplings. We got the sampler order which had four different kinds of dumplings. One had a curry filling, one was traditional pork, one had a cheeseburger filling, and the final one had mushrooms and vermicelli in it.

After our little snack, we wandered around and looked at some of the older buildings in the downtown area. Portland is very committed to keeping the old buildings and revitalizing them. Here are a few examples of some of the buildings we saw. 

And we ended up at, surprise, another local brewery called Rock Bottom. A few dumplings didn't make a lunch so we had some asiago crab dip to go with our pints. 

After that, we were done and headed back over the bridge one last time to our hotel. Tomorrow, we'll be off to the Columbia River Gorge to see some waterfalls and do some hiking.