Portland City
Driving in the US wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. It certainly took a little bit of getting used to, but wasn’t anywhere near as complicated as expected. I thought turning corners and deciphering road rules would be the hardest things, but so long as we kept reciting our mantra ‘right is right, right is right’, it wasn’t actually a problem. For me, to my surprise, the difficult thing was keeping the car in the lane that I was driving in. When you’re used to steering from the other side of the car, you tend align it differently on the road. I got the hang of it, though.
We spent one morning checking out downtown Portland. I found myself constantly getting distracted by creative signage. It’s very often large and high and interestingly crafted. Or just vintage. Vintage is cool.
And another one, just for fun.
We stopped at one of the many Oregon Ducks stores in Portland. That city loves its football team. There’s actually another college football team in Oregon, the Oregon State University Beavers, but I really didn’t see or hear much of them.
We took a little bit of a stroll along the waterfront, which was really pretty. There were a lot of homeless people about. Evidently Portland has a proportionately large number of homeless, because Portland is a good place to be homeless in – there are places to get food and shelter if needed. It was still a little confronting, as I hadn’t seen quite that much of a concentration of homeless people before. It makes you wonder what brought them to that place, what their stories are, where their families are – and what’s going to happen to them.
Steve and Brenna took us to visit Powell’s Books, which is the largest independent used and new bookstore in the world. It takes up one whole city block and has several levels. Andy found himself a second-hand Fantastic Four Behind-The-Scenes book, and we bought some new Tintins at bargain prices.
Love this couple.