Portland

We interrupted our drive to Portland to visit another Costco store. This one had no sales tax because that's what they do in Oregon. I decided that I had to have a 2 TB passport drive to back up all the pictures from the trip. Since it cost less than at home and there was no tax, it was an easy purchase. We also stocked up on local wines at ridiculous prices. Costco also has a whole aisle of beer from the standard American watered down stuff to real craft beers. Why can't our Costco be as civilized?
As we drove into the Portland area, we saw the signs for Hayden Island. Felt sort of weird to see a whole island with our name on it. It's about a 20 minute drive with no traffic to downtown Portland. Our arrival on a Friday assured that there was lots of traffic. 

We drove back into Portland and walked around the downtown areas for a couple of hours. There are a lot of heritage buildings that have been carefully renovated and made into stores and offices. It was a much nicer downtown to walk in than Seattle. The first order of business was to find something to eat as it was lunch time. Portland has more food trucks and carts per capita than anywhere else in the states. We found the area where a whole block is dedicated to what they call food pods. They are like little trailers that sit on blocks. The food trucks were somewhere else. Might find those on Sunday. We walked around the block to check out all the places and it was great to see so much variety. Toronto should take a look at this set up. In the end I chose 808 Grind, which is a Hawaiian truck. 808 is the Hawaii area code. I had a combo of two types of chicken plus sides. I found out that this cart was featured on an episode of Eat Street. 

Marilyn chose a chicken bento box from Bento Box. Surprise!

Here are some shots of the other food carts. Once again, the world did not end when food vendors with real food were allowed to be present in the downtown area!

After lunch, which turned out to be really big and our main meal of the day, we started our walking tour of Portland. It's divided into different sections and we explored two. The Pearl District is an older area with many heritage buildings. There are 3 craft breweries listed in downtown Portland. We tried one today and will likely visit the others before we leave. Deschutes Brewery was in a converted old factory type building. We couldn't decide on what we wanted and got the 6 beer sampler. We'd have to go back a couple more times to try all the beers that they had.

The downtown area was really quite interesting to explore. 

And that was about it for today. Back at our hotel, we were quite impressed. We had a king suite for $99 that had everything you could ask for. Plus they gave us coupons for each day of our stay that give us 2 glasses of wine each in the bar, breakfast and a light dinner if we choose to be here. As well, the people are friendly and helpful. Couldn't ask for more. Tomorrow, we will likely head off to Canon Beach and Seaside which are two towns on the ocean.