Oregon! Oregon! Oregon!
August 12-18, 2009: The Porti Go Interstate
Travis, Michele, and Julia go on vacation alone together—just the 3 of them— for the first time since...well, for the first time. Literally.
The point is, have you ever seen a 9+ foot sturgeon?! They are freeeaky and prehistoric looking! Check it:
OK. On to Portland. One of our favorite cities, evah.
Above: Julia while waiting to be seated at dinner.
Above: Julia and Travis in front of the Greek restaurant at which we ate. The purple octopus is a little hard to ignore. I know, it's a little gimmicky, but I've eaten there twice now and it's been pretty good.
Above: Julia and me *over* the world's smallest park—Mill Ends Park.
I suspect that Anthony Bourdain's spotlight on Voodoo Doughnuts in his No Reservations TV show added to crowdedness. Travis was a good sport.
The following clip is worth a look:
So, Voodoo Doughnuts is famous because they put random @$&*! on donuts? Well...yeah!
I love Powell's, but it's a bit overwhelming. I went there without a plan, and ended up wandering around for an hour and impulse-buying a used Dean Koontz book. Lame!
Fast-forward many hours, with a quick shout-out to the Tillamook Cheesemakers
The OSU Marine Science Center has plenty of touch pools, tanks of critters, a noble cause, and no crowds. What more do you need?
Next up—beach time at Yaquina Bay State Park!
Above: Family photo with a little help from a kind passerby.
At this point in the trip, we entered the "The Lost 24 Hours". We packed up camp one day early and traveled to Florence, Oregon so that a doctor could help us with the mysterious hives that Julia slowly developed over the previous day and that we weren't able to deal with. We got very familiar with the Florence hospital ER waiting room, the Florence Fred Meyer, the Florence pizza joint, and the Florence dive-of-a-motel-at-the-intersection-of-two-highways-with-a-25-cent-per-bucket-ice-machine-and-mismatched-sheets. It wasn't our best 24 hours.
To make up for "The Lost 24 Hours", we stayed in Bend for one extra day.
Above: In downtown Bend. Such a cute city.
Above: Stealth view of Julia. She's such a good traveler and entertains herself well.
The End.
Mill Ends Park (sometimes mistakenly called Mill's End Park)[1] in Portland, Oregon, United States, is a small park that was created on St. Patrick's Day, 1948, to be a colony for leprechauns and a location for snail races. It is the smallest park in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records, which first granted it this recognition in 1971. The park is a circle 2 ft (0.61 m) across, with a total area of 452 sq in (0.292 m2), in a traffic median which in 1948 was intended to be the site for a light pole. When the pole failed to appear and weeds sprouted in the opening, Dick Fagan, a columnist for the Oregon Journal, planted flowers in the hole and named it after his column in the paper, "Mill Ends". Fagan's office in the Journal building overlooked the median in the middle of the busy thoroughfare that ran in front of the building and was then known as SW Front Avenue.
Fagan told the story of the park's origin:[citation needed] He looked out the window and spotted a leprechaun digging in the hole. He ran down and grabbed the leprechaun, which meant that he had earned a wish. Fagan said he wished for a park of his own; but since he had not specified the size of the park in his wish, the leprechaun gave him the hole. Over the next two decades, Fagan often featured the park and its head leprechaun, named Patrick O'Toole, in his whimsical column.
Fagan died of cancer in 1969, but the park lived on, cared for by others. It was named an official city park in 1976. Mill Ends Park is located at SW Naito Parkway and SW Taylor in downtown Portland.
The small circle has featured many unusual items through the decades, including a swimming pool for butterflies—complete with diving board, a horseshoe, a fragment of the Journal building, and a miniature Ferris wheel which was delivered by a full size crane.
In February 2006, the park was temporarily relocated during road construction to a planter outside the World Trade Center Portland, about 80 feet (24 m) from its permanent location. It was returned to its home—now named SW Naito Parkway—on March 16, 2007.[2][3]
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