Special Edition: Portland

For my awesome 23rd birthday Grayson and I went to Portland, a favorite city, because of 1. Powell's and 2. You can get there by train. Grayson and I have never been on a train, unless you count my jaunt on the Boston subway once. The whole ride was about 4 hours (technically longer than driving) but it was scenic, and unstressful, and awesome.

Tuesday, 9/9

The train, as said, was AWESOME. Spacious, comfy, pretty, scenic and RAD.


There was even a conductor in a lil conductor hat.

Here's Grayson on the lounge car, we got breakfast on the train and ate it in this great car, with tons of pretty windows. There was even a tour guide lady on the train point out sites and history. The train went through Tacoma and Steillicum and all these pretty watery areas.

Grayson got me a surprise present (since buying a bunch of books at Powell's wasn't a birthday surprise)
It's a Lucky Cat, whose head bobs and hand waves in the sun. Too cute!

Once in Portland, we stayed at the Ace Hotel on Stark, which is the Portland branch of a hotel we stayed in Seattle on a visit before our move, it was very modern and hip. They had a vintage photo booth, bikes to rent (Portland is bike-crazy!), nummy smelling soap in the rooms, and a PowerBook to surfs on for free.


Here's our daytime view:



And night time:

Wednesday, 9/10

My official birthday passed in the spacious corridors of the West's biggest bookstore, Powell's...my Mecca:

Damage done:

After some other adventures and walking around, my birthday dinner was a delicious pizza from some gourmet place near our hotel:

and then I got my birthday cake!!! Grayson and I found a cupcake shop in the Pearl District, and they had so many tasty cupcakes, that I couldn't settle on one, and was able to get four mini tiny ones:


We even got candles at Whole Foods for them, made from organic beeswax or something. They came with matches! Score!


The flavors are, from left to right, Chocolate-covered pretzel, "the Pearl" which was vanilla on vanilla, "Downtown Chocolate Brown," chocolate on chocolate, and Rice-krispy treat, which had real rice crispies on top, and was very nums.

Thursday, 9/11

The rest of the trip was spent pallin' around different sites. We went to even more bookshops, the Hawthorne District, Queen Bee studios, and the Gorey store. Navigating the bus system was wicked easy with our Seattle skills:


We had a delicious breakfast (Challah french toast and latkes with sour cream and apple sauce):

and exchanged our return tickets for earlier ones since our checkout was 6 hours before the train was supposed to leave. We came home, picked up kitty from his luxury hotel, and have spent the rest of the weekend chillaxing. In the time we were gone, four new restaurants in our neighborhood popped up. INSANE.

Tune in next week for: A visit from your humble narrator's MOMMY :D