I decided it was high time to capture some impressions of cities I've been visiting this year, this being a travel blog and those cities being enough of a good time that I plan to find my way back.
Is back a preposition in that case?
Anyway, here goes:
I went to Portland with what I'm beginning to think of as my West Coast Travel Team. Kelly and Erik are at the center, surrounded by me and a handful of Kelly's engineering friends (hereafter called MY friends). I met them all last year during my time in Tahoe and liked them immediately. Kelly's friends are fun, kind, and ridiculously smart when it comes to engineering (more on that a few trips below).
That gang had been gathering in cool cities for a while, as they're scattered across Reno/Tahoe, Montana, Seattle, and, now, Los Angeles. Having been lucky to catch them when they descended on the lake, I was looped in for the next adventure in Portland, Oregon. Portland had been on my shortlist of west coast cities to visit since before I even left work last July. In fact, I had intended to visit Portland from Tahoe before I, you know, looked at a map. It's far. It could have been done, but it's far.
I flew in late Thursday night after work and joined the gang at the end of a long night of festivities, including balloon animals. Actual Balloon Animals. We had a few beers to catch up, then called it a night as I was beat from the day and everyone else had essentially stayed up to see me get in.
The next morning, I woke early and went out to work on the porch of our AirBnB. Kelly had picked a real winner, with a large main room and a long table for eating and board games, all located in a great, walkable neighborhood east of the river.
Having risen so early, I got a decent day of work in before people started stirring. Once they did, a few of us walked down to Stumptown for some cold brew, which I brought back in growler form because it was available and I wanted it. I worked a while longer with my friends chatting nearby (read: playing the house's conch and didgeridoo) and then we all piled into an Uber and hit up the Oregon Brewers Festival.
The Festival was actually one of my first true beer festivals and it did not disappoint, although I did when I failed to keep track of the beers I was trying to report back to my Druncles. The festival was held in a waterfront park, so we wandered around, played some corn hole, placed pins in an impressive map of people's hometowns, and, of course, got tipsy on craft beer.
We finally put some food in ourselves at Kell's Irish Pub, where a sea of quarters pinched in dollar bills on the ceiling caught our eye. We spent a good long while discussing the how (added magnets? added pins?) before asking for a demonstration. Our server called in a second waiter, who took our dollar and quarter, twisted them up and fired them up into the ceiling, where they stuck. We think the answer is pins.
After that, we needed a break, so we returned to the AirBNB and took a break for board games. We played some rounds of Coup and a game of Bang! that was driven indoors by wind. Then, sufficiently rested, we struck out into the neighborhood for dinner.
After we ate (at the Bagdad Theatre, I believe), we were picked up by Kevin, another former engineering classmate and Portland resident, who took us to Fred Meyer to buy more beer, more balloons for animal-making, and a kiddie pool for the next day. I specifically decided that I had had too many of Portland's fine IPAs and picked up a variety pack to mix things up a bit. Only when I got home did I learn that it was a variety pack OF IPAs. PORTLAND!
We drank beer and played games, breaking out Codenames for the first time on the trip. I had only learned the game at the beginning of the month, but I was already hooked. After an either failed or terrifically successful tutorial (I made them guess the black card in one turn), everyone else got the bug too and we played for hours, cycling the code masters around the table. Eventually, Kevin left (meeting our protestations with a mind-blowing look at the time), someone put on Rick and Morty, and we all fell asleep on the couch.
The next morning began very similarly. I woke up early to work, Kristin and I made another Stumptown run, and we had breakfast around the long dining table. The gang had climbing gym plans, but I had set up drinks with my college theatre friend Joe, so I stayed behind to get some more work done before we met.
Joe suggested the Imperial Bottle Shop & Taproom, which was walkable from the house, so I retraced some of the previous night's dinner steps and met up with him and his wife Alex. Joe was a senior when I was a freshman, which through no fault of his own resulted in a pretty well-ingrained "oh, god, what does Joe think of me?" mentality that hadn't had a good chance to fade away since he graduated. Thankfully, there in Portland, that mindset was nowhere to be found. Instead, we had a nice time catching up slash doting on his puggle, Chief, who is a world-renowned internet celebrity.
After I parted ways with Joe and Alex, I Ubered to meet the post-climb group for lunch at EastBurn before we all went home and jumped in the kiddie pool. It was a tight fit for the six of us and I had Water Watcher duty assigned to me (it was an actual nametag that came with the pool...is lifeguard copyrighted?), but we made the best of it before alternating showers and heading out for the night.
That night, we were meeting Kelly's brother downtown. We got some drinks first at a bar called Hamlet(!), at which point Wes from Seattle and I had a pretty serious heart-to-heart about my journeys last year and the importance of doing your own thing. We really solved the problems of the world. Dinner came in the form of delicious pizza at Oven and Shaker, where the slices passed around ranged from a light margarita to something with a maple bacon theme.
We then went on a bit of a bar crawl. I couldn't tell you the name of the first place we stopped at, which is just as well, as it was pretty jam-packed and their cornhole bags were so thinly filled it felt like we were hucking teabags back and forth.
Ultimately, however, we landed back at Kell's Irish Pub, where we found good beers and great trad music, which is a personal favorite. I hope those guys enjoyed my scream-singing along with them through Dirty Old Town and I'll Tell Me Ma. In any case, they shut the place down (with a killer version of Mumford's "I Will Wait") and we made our way home to sleep it off.
Sunday was rough. Wes drove back to Seattle early, so we had to play man-down the rest of the day. Getting seated for breakfast at Trinket took so long that most of us just went quiet until we were called and, once inside, we opted for playing Coup until our food came because we were too beat to talk. The breakfast perked us up, however, and I suggested we haul our luggage over to the Imperial Bottle Shop, remembering from drinks with Joe that there were tables and space for our bags while we waited for our Uber.
Thus we ended the trip, sturdy beers in hand and eyes locked on a Codenames board in the middle of a hipstery bar.
Thanks, Portland.
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