Day 18: Portland - Big bread, books and beer in a day

Parm coming to you here to deliver the lowdown on Portland:

After leaving Seattle with a new window and a few less items in the car (gold star for lightening our load temporarily, sad face for the incident...), we made our way to Portland. I've had the pleasure of spending quite a bit of time of this lovely city during my time at work so I was ready to show Katie and Emmie the highlights during our short visit.

Rundown of the day, "most amazing style":

1. Bomb lunch at one of the most amazing restaurants in the country - Nicholas

2. Kickin it chill style at the most amazing bookstore in the country - Powell's

3. Rockin around town on the free light rail - the Max

4. Sampling the NW brews at Deschutes Brewery

Views of downtown Portland from the Burnside bridge:

We left our hotel, the lovely downtown Courtyard Marriott to head over to the east side of Portland to one of my favorite restaurants, Nicholas, for lunch. Again we asked ourselves, "what will we do when the Marriott points run out?" Traveling will be rough. Not to mention getting back to that whole work everyday thing...but I digress.

Nicholas is a phenomenal Lebanese restaurant and the site of 12,044 work meals during my time in Portland. I highly recommend this place to anyone traveling to Portland! Katie and Emmie are now addicted converts to the "big bread" aka piping hot pita bread 30 inches in diameter. Literally.

Katie at Nicholas:

After lunch I took these two over to Powell's bookstore, not telling them much other than "it's a big bookstore." For anyone who's ever been to Powell's, you know this is a serious understatement. This is THE largest, most amazing, comprehensive and funky independent bookstore in the country. Likely the world too, in my humble opinion. Powell's takes up a full city block with its 4-story building and has expanded to a second building across the street for science and technical books. Katie and Emmie were quick Powell's fans and we promptly got lost in the maze of great bookstore smells and color-coded book sections.

Shout out to Mr. Sam Shannon and his love of the good pun:

After 3 or 4 hours of browsing, reading and cafe-ing, we wrestled ourselves out of the bookstore, a bit grudgingly to say the least. Conversations had during this time included the two-week old internal struggle of "do we try to do as much as possible to carpe diem the travel day?" versus "it's our vacation dammit, we can do whatever we want!" Carpe diem won out this time as we left with some pretty awesome books and headed to REI to replace some of Katie's stolen items.

...5 hours later we left REI.

Just kidding. But we did get to know the Portland REI very well as we had an impromptu fashion show of day packs.

Things we learned during the fashion show:

1. The straps on little kid backpacks hit adult women at an odd height (yes, I know you all already knew this)

2. Current trends in backpacks include lots of waist straps

3. Pockets on waist straps are odd. We decided that they were obviously not tested with women.

4. REI employees don't appreciate it when you take every backpack off the rack and lay them down across the mattress pad table. We did inadvertently observe a few awkward mattress pad testings. Odd.

We then jumped on the free light rail tram and headed over to a local brewery for a beer and something to eat. Portland is one of the easiest cities to get around with and welcomes all folks to their downtown with the "fareless zone" of free transit.

The large Deschutes Brewery pleasantly surprised us with some great brews and a large sample. We've noticed a trend of the samples getting larger and better as we go - a good trend! I'd recommend the Sour Quad, Katie gives a thumbs up to the Cyclist and Emmie to the Cascade. The varying taste in brews comes in handy and we haven't had any brew-ha-has yet over a sample. :)

A sweet and productive brunch at Bijou followed the next morning as we tallied up our shared receipts and were impressed with our spending totals to date. Right on budget without even realizing it! Gold star for all three of us for staying on budget and a second gold star for being able to shut the laptop down at the table. It's hard for us at times.

We then dropped Katie off at the PDX airport for a weekend wedding at Notre Dame and Emmie and I headed to Salem for a grand weekend with my aunt and uncle. Good hair days to come!