Hi, my name is Mike and this is the story of my trip to Portland.

Bee had come down to Van for the weekend so she could come to Portland with me. We ended up catching a much earlier bus than originally planned so we spent about 6 or so hours in Seattle eating awesome Asian food at Bambusa (damn that place does good food) and checking out some of the sites.

First off we found my sign again:

Then we went and had more pictures with other quirky monuments such as the Fremont Troll and the bus stop people:

We killed some more time drinking beers and enduring terrible karaoke at the pub, before heading back and spending a mostly sleepless night on the freezing Greyhound. We arrived to Portland around 4:30am, sat around in the terminal waiting for the sun to come up to find somewhere to eat.

It didn’t take us too long to get bored of sitting around and soon we just left to try and find anything open. Turns out Portland can be pretty shifty when the sun is yet to come up, especially the part of town that the Greyhound is in. We found this awesome little 50’s style diner, complete with a surly old greek couple serving us. Pretty awesome pancakes were had.

I really enjoyed Portland, it’s a really relaxed, clean city. It’s not touristy by any means and I’m sure I would have struggled to find things to do had I been on my own. Thankfully Bee was there to laugh with me rather than at me when I decided to make my own fun. Like chasing geese and gulls:

Or posing with bronze animals:

Or a flashing woman:

Right after this shot was taken a creepy guy sauntered my way and whispered "putchyer hand on her bewb."

Part of the reason for heading to Portland was to catch Thursday on tour playing the Full Collapse album in full. With a bit of emailing around to managers and publicists I scored a free ticket to review the show which was cool since I haven’t done the writing thing in close to 2 years so I was happy to give it another crack. I also won a competition to meet Geoff and Tucker before the show and listen to some of the new album that isn’t out yet. They were good dudes and the new record was sounding pretty cool. The show itself was cool, a little lacklustre to be honest but whatever, I was enjoying just being in Portland and hanging out so all was good.

The next morning we headed out to Mill Ends Park. This is it:

I may not take the best pictures around, but the camera is intentionally tilted down from that lush green park… since Mill Ends Park is actually that 2-foot wide thing with a half dead bush in the middle of the road. It’s officially recognised as the world’s smallest park.

I am Gigantor

A would-be highlight of the trip was Voodoo Doughnuts, something every travel site about Portland recommends. I like doughnuts, and Bee does too, so this seemed relevant to our interests.

Unfortunately for us, Murphy was hard at work seeing that his law was not about to be proven wrong:

We ended the day with a trip up the skycar that takes you from the university’s lower campus to it’s upper campus/hospital, and has some pretty sweet views along the way. This was the point it seemed like a hilarious idea to text the folks “Just thought I should let you know I’m at the hospital in Portland. We’re both fine, I’ll fill you in soon.” They didn’t find it as funny as I.

View over Portland, toward Mount St. Helens.

And that’s the story of my trip to Portland.

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