Last Day in Portland

We finished our visit to Astoria on Thursday evening with a visit to the Astoria Brewing Company with our friends Erhard & Elfi (on the left picture). Being the smallest of four or five breweries in town, they had really great IPAs.

Friday morning, after breakfast, we departed for Portland, still gray skies and not too warm. It’s been an easy drive of about 1,5 hours and our first stop was Washington Park, a huge green area on the slopes of a hill on the west side of town, consisting of wooded areas with trails (the Hoyt Arboretum), gardens - like the famous Rose and the Japanese Garden - and museums like the Children’s Museum or the Discovery/Forrestry Center (pic above, left).

We enjoyed the Rose Garden (pics below), though not many roses were in bloom yet. They are one of few „Rose Test Gardens“ in the U.S. where new varieties are tested before they come on the open market.


The Japanese Garden is gorgeous, and different from many others: much vaster and on different terraces, with interesting architecture and integrated into the natural beauty of Oregon’s trees and shrubs.


Pittock Mansion, our next stop, was the mansion of a famous Portlandian newspaper magnat, very luxurious for the time of construction (1914) and offering great views from up there.

On to Williams and the Alberta Arts District, in the Northwest of Portland. Especially Alberta is a neighborhood which is up & coming with plenty of unique shops, galleries, breweries, coffee shops, bars and restaurants. Also, there were so many murals of high quality all around (pics). Probably this is right now the most interesting neighborhood in Portland. We parked and walked Alberta Street up and down and finished our exploration with a „Blue Cheese & Pear“ ice-cream from Salt & Straw, a gourmet ice-cream maker. Sounds funny, but was delicious. In the meantime the sun came out a bit and it was getting warmer, too.


Through downtown we drove out of town, which took us a little in the heavy Friday afternoon traffic. Nevertheless, Fort Vancouver, already on the Washington side of the Columbia River, was well worth the drive. Originally it was not a military fortification, but a 19th century fur trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Trade goods and supplies from London arrived by ships or overland and were exchanged with fur pelts and other items from native peoples. Furs from Fort Vancouver were even shipped to China and traded for Chinese goods (as porcellan or tea) for sale in the UK. Today, a full-scale replica of the fort has been constructed and the buildings give a good idea of the former function and operation of a trading post. Especially beautiful were the gardens, and we were wondering how many volunteers are involved to grow all the different varieties of veggies, fruit and other plants.

At around 6 pm we checked in at the Aloft Hotel closeby the airport, returned the car at Alamo and took MAX (light rail) back to the hotel and called it a day, because we had to get up at 3 am in the morning to catch our flight to Denver/Colorado.