Our plan is to spend about half of our trip on the east side and half on the west side of Portland. This way we can explore both areas. As we relocate we have to spend some time on the way so we don’t arrive too early so we decide to stop in the middle at the downtown Farmers Market. Finding a parking spot is difficult but afterwards the market is easy to find as it is quite large and on the central boulevard in the area.
While the available produce looks quite nice it isn’t that useful for us as we were hoping for fruits or something similar instead of pumpkins and onions and what not.
The market is inside the university area and there are some beautiful ivy covered buildings that we (and the birds) enjoy. Nearby we find a small free university art museum that we visit for half an hour before returning to the car and driving to the accomodation.
The accomodation here is quite different from the first one. It has a long driveway where we can park more privately and a large fenced front yard with a table tennis setup and a few other useful features if we plan to stay outside.
Inside it has three rooms versus two in the previous one but it is difficult to find one good for sleep due to heat and cold issue, some are too hot and some too cold with no way to fine tune the temperature. What we like is that the owner provided for us in the living room a bottle of wine from the area that we enjoy during our stay.
The kitchen itself is quite busy and we are afraid that we are going to forget some of our items there, luckily that didn’t happen in the end.
The backyard is not that well maintained with the footpaths being treacherous and a few broken planks. A lot of effort went into organizing the patio though which is quite nice, for the squirrels that visit it regularly.
In fact there are squirrels everywhere as they like the bird feeder up front given that they learned how to access it and we can even touch them if we want to as they are not aware if you approach the feeder. One of the reasons we chose this AirBnB was the fact that hens were advertised as being part of the house, there is only one left but we have a lot of fun just observing what she is doing and how hopeful she is when she sees new people.
On the first day we buy some Greek food from a nearby restaurant in order not to arrive too early. The food is quite good and this area has a good choice of restaurants that we use also during the next days.
We taste-test some vietnamese and hawaiian cuisine while here as well a few other fusion cuisine, at least we never were hungry while staying in the area.
Interestingly relatively close to the accomodation is a waterfall and before leaving we are visiting it after parking at the nearby church. It has a short boardwalk to an overlook of the falls which while small are impressive.
On the last day we arrive slightly later at the airport than we intended after visiting a famous bookstore in the area, Powell’s, and we don’t have time to get to the lounge which is in another terminal. At least there is no issue with the car return as we were stressed a bit due to the many dings and scratches. Given the limited time till the plane leaves we eat at the food court at a fish-themed restaurant as somehow during the week we stayed here we never ate fish. The food is good and the flight back is uneventful and soon we are home happily in the Phoenix heat after the cold and rain in Portland.
