Portland, Part Deux

So we spent a week at Manzanita (and I know, I owe you a post entirely about that, but for now you will have to settle for the Manzanita Trip Flickr Photo set), then we returned to glorious Portland.  Only, we were not so happy about the drive to Portland.  We were less than 10 minutes from our destination, when traffic ground to a halt, and we encountered this:

Yes, that says ALL LANES CLOSED.  We spent the next THREE HOURS (really!) driving those final two miles.  UGH!  While we were sitting there, not moving on the highway, the Emergency Broadcast System announced that we needed to take cover due to impending severe thunderstorms and hail.  The severe weather never really materialized, and instead, we got this:

Yup, what you're seeing there is a super-violent, really threatening rainbow.  Because that's how Portland rocks severe weather.
Also, we spent a lot of our three hours sitting under this:

This looks to me like an amusement park ride, but it's actually the Aeriel Tram, which is just one of the many methods of public transit in Portland.  So, some people actually commute to work on this thing!  Fun fact here, among the various slogans that Portland claims, one (since 1995) is "The City that Works."  I would like to add, it is "The City that gets to work via particularly awesome means of transit, including SkyTrams, cargo bikes, roller blades, and pogo sticks*."
*I don't actually know that anyone actually commute via pogo stick, but I am pretty secure in my guess that if anyone does this, that person lives in Portland. 

So I've now spent a ridiculous amount of this post talking about just getting to Portland.  But there's so much more to cover and I am so very tired.  I'm going to try to get the highlights down, just so we can remember things and hopefully expand a bit later.

In Portland, we continued our visit with Susan, Sone, Leone, and Evelyn, and the kids kept up the super-hero and imaginative play time like crazy:

Yup, that's Harry Potter Lucy and Astronaut Leone, jumping.  They had a great time. So great, in fact, that when it was sadly time for us to leave, Leone informed us "I can't bear it."  He actually said that.  I wanted to cry.

We also continued to stuff our faces with pastry and baked goods from Grand Central and pizza from Pizzicato Pizza.  And we spent a lot of time just generally enjoying the charming environs of Multnomah Village. It's adorable and delicious and charming we would like to go there now.

We spent a bit of time at Oaks Park amusement park, one of those sort of old-time throw-back parks with old clickety-clackety-kinda roller coasters.  It was, as our good friend Leone would say, very "old school."  They also had a lot of these things:

I'm a fan.  You'll see, though, that Lucy doesn't exactly look like she's having fun.  This is because she has recently discovered the cruel, cruel truth about carnival games: you're not going to win that stuffed animal you see.  We've been to FunLand in Rehoboth in years past, where it seemed that Uncle Ernie was always able to secure a stuffed toy from some kind of game of chance.  But here in Oaks Park, there's no such mercy prize for the crying child.  Life lesson learned.  But not accepted.  She still wanted to roll the bowling ball down the thing and try to make it stop in the right place (of course, this did not work, and of course, we left again in tears).  Way to go, Oaks Park!  Nonetheless, Lucy did enjoy the carousel and the bumper cars, and we got to catch up with old friends:

We continued on our Very Portland Weekend (TM) by meeting up with friends in the Mississippi Avenue Neighborhood and hitting some of the favorites there.  We got great ice cream at Ruby Jewel.  Lucy stuck with the simple double chocolate, but Jake got some kind of concoction, and it was delicious.

Walking down Mississippi, we passed a family with a child carrying a bag with a sea cucumber in it.  Oh sure, that's totally normal, right?  Well, the last time you saw a kid with a bag full of sea cucumber, did you ALSO see a chicken running around on the sidewalk and then walk over to see someone's Lego display in the window of a lighting supply shop?  I didn't think so.  (FYI, the kid had just bought his sea cucumber not for eating, but for displaying in an aquarium.  He was right outside Cuttlefish and Coral, a salt water aquarium supply shop.  Also, here's a link to someone else's Flickr stream with photos of the Lego display in the Sunlan Lighting shop window.)

And then there was Pistils, a place where they have live chickens hanging about. Just, you know, downtown, in a city.  Chickens.  Walking the street, inviting you into the store.  Did I not make that clear?  Here's some photo evidence, and mind you, this is in the city of Portland, in a business that sells garden things and, well, chickens:

Lucy was delighted and didn't want to leave the chicken store.

The chickens, on the other hand, did.

We did a bit more strolling along Mississippi, and I got an awesome falafel at Wolf & Bear's.  Delicious.

We also had a grown-up night out at our friends' bar, The Foggy Notion, where you should absolutely go if you're in Portland.  We regret that we didn't get to go to The Playground Gym with Lucy, but we definitely plan to do that next time!

I also had a lot of luck with shopping, and really enjoyed the fashion fun of Portland and the shoppes in Manzanita.  Here are the spiffy hats Lucy and I acquired in our attempt to fit in in Portland:

Do we look like we could be in a Portlandia sketch yet?  Well, let me just say, the hats are local.  I didn't put a bird on it, but I could have.

There's more to write, but there's also a definite need for sleep that my eyes are about to enforce.

Portland, we hardly knew ye.  We hope to be back again soon.