The land of port part 1

This is the first in a series of retro-posts.  Stuff that I had planned to write about, but because I was so focused on my thesis, I never got around to it.  There probably won’t be very many, but I’ll see what I can come up with.

This post is also the first in new category.  If you have never noticed the categories, they are on the navigation menu on the right, and usually there is a link right below the title.  The new category is “Travels”.  Chelsea and I intend to do some traveling in the next few years, and we’ll be sure to document the best of it.

About three years back, Chelsea’s sister Danielle and my sister Claire came to visit us for Thankgiving and we all had a blast (its one of the reasons Chels and I knew we were a good match).  We promised them that in the next coming years, that we would visit each of them for Thanksgiving.  Last year we went to Texas to visit D, so naturally this year we were up to visit Claire in Portland.

Unfortunately Thanksgiving was going to be cutting it close for my thesis business, and last minute flight prices were obscene.  We decided to head out there on short notice in the beginning of Nov. instead.  Above is the closest I got to finding the port the city is named after.  If you look hard in the distance you can see Mt. Hood.  OK, you can’t actually see Mt. Hood, but I keep telling myself that it’s there anyway.

Claire was an excellent host and took us all around the city.  Our first stops were to her old neighborhood.  We had plenty of good food, and took a walk around to work some of it off.  Above we stopped at a rose garden, that didn’t actually have many roses due to the season.  The picture above is also one of the few times it wasn’t raining.  Certainly rain in Portland is not exactly breaking news, but it didn’t just rain while we were there, it poured.  Ask Chelsea about shopping for rain boots sometime.

Although we did get wet, we had a great first day exploring the city and learning the public transportation system.  Unfortunately our travel troubles the previous night left us a little tired on West coast time, so we called it an early night.  Part II tomorrow.