Pt 50 – Voodoo, Bibliophiles & A Rose Garden

Tuesday, June 11th – Wednesday, June 12th, 2013

We took I-5 South to Route 410 East, and took a brief stop in Bonney Lake, WA for coffee. There was little scenery as we drove through Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest since most of the trees were cut down. I was disappointed when we arrived at Mount Rainier National Park since most of the roads were closed due to snow. It was also too foggy to see most of the views that would have been visible otherwise.

Feeling a little defeated, we took Route 123 to US Route 12 West through Gifford Pinchot National Forest and continued driving in the rain over the bridge to the state of Oregon. We drove around in circles to find another nonexistent Welcome Center. A homeless guy told us how to get to one, telling us, “That’s a nice place to take a picture.” Well he thought he was telling us how to get to the “Welcome” Center, but ended up directing us to an RV Park that had “Welcome” flags hanging out front of it. It’s the thought that counts, right? Before entering downtown Portland, OR, we watched people play ultimate Frisbee at a nearby park.

The dream of the 90’s is indeed alive in Portland and I was loving it! It was a small city without all the chaos. There were a lot of cute shops and a whole block of food trucks. It was hard to decide where to eat! We settled on a late dinner at a food truck called “Saaj Baghdad”. I got the Shawarma Chicken and Trevor got the Saaj Chicken, both were delicious.

We soon realized that we had made so many random turns in fascination with our surroundings, that we had no idea how to get back to our van. Our van was lost. We walked around forever. I remembered that the van was parked by a crane. As we walked towards it, I never anticipated that there would be several of them surrounding the city. We followed the wrong one. Eventually we located the Patagonia store, which was a landmark located close to our van, and in finding it we were able to find our van. We slept well that night.

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A little pick me up in the form of juice from “Greenleaf Juicing Co.”, and coffee at “Black Rooster Café” was in order. It was raining again, but we made the best of it. We checked out the famous “Voodoo Doughnut” which had a line out the door, but moved along quickly. Trevor got the “Vegan Cock-n-Balls”, I grabbed a cinnamon one and another called the “Triple Chocolate Penetration” (a chocolate doughnut with chocolate icing with Cocoa Puffs on top).

We burned off all those calories by walking around Pioneer Place mall, then headed back near “Voodoo Doughnut” to get coffee at “Stumptown Coffee Roasters.” Then I was in heaven at “Powell’s Books” three level bookstore.

After killing some serious time there (Trevor’s not the literary type so he was dying to get me to leave), we chose “Taste of Fiji (Ren’s Takeaway)” to eat. We both ordered some super delicious Butter Chicken with rice and salad, and the owner of the food truck was super nice and was very curious about our trip.

We returned to our van to grab our raincoats and killed some time at “Buffalo Exchange” and back at “Powell’s Books”. The rain started to die down thankfully as we wandered over to Washington Park to admire the rose garden. It was absolutely beautiful there!

We grabbed coffee at “Laughing Planet Café” before turning it in.

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Jump Back to Part 49: The Underground, Grunge & A Troll

Jump Ahead to Part 51: Ocean, Rust, Food Poisoning & “Man vs. Bike Rack”

OR

Start Over at Part 01: The Blue Bubble, Freebies & A Rude Awakening