Portland and Haunted Pizza
We loaded up around 60 geocaches into our GPS receivers to possibly find along our trip. Time and the elements – or just lack of interest – prevented us from going after nearly all of them. The only geocache we were determined to go find was the Original Stash Tribute Plaque, where the game of geocaching originated. It was located rather out of the way, outside of Oregon City, Oregon. We found the plaque, snapped a couple of pictures, found the cache, and were quickly on our way to Portland.
Downtown Portland is an interesting place. It has many of the oddities you’d expect a big city to have, just a bit smaller in scale in most regards. The river walk was pretty busy, probably due to it being an unusually pleasant day for February, but the city itself wasn’t too much abuzz with cars and people, which was nice.
We stopped in to Old Town Pizza, an establishment that’s been reported to be haunted and a local favorite. We sat in the back booth where it is rumored a girl named Nina died after being thrown down an elevator shaft (and is now the booth we dined in). None of us could claim that we experienced the spirit of the girl visiting us, but it did make for some interesting conversation while we dined.
Keeping in theme with the unusual, we stopped into Voodoo Doughnut, where they claim that “The magic is in the hole.” They have some rather interesting types of doughnuts such as the Voodoo Doll Doughnut (a voodoo doll filled with red berry filling, impaled with a pretzel stick), the Bacon Maple Bar (a maple bar topped with bacon), and the Cock-n-Balls (shaped like, well … as it sounds).
While none of us were brave or hungry enough to order the Cock-n-Balls (it was rather large, after all) but we did enjoy our choices as we walked down the street in search of Powell’s Books. After wandering a bit and asking directions (it wasn’t on our map!) we found the book store. There’s a reason why this place is so well known. Not only is it huge, it houses an incredible variety of books!
Our day ended with a feast at Christine’s sister’s home. Her husband is an incredible cook and made us a delicious meal that would have taken us days to finish, had we the time. Tomorrow we depart on our return trip to California.
Memorable quote: “I can’t believe that I’m saying it’s warm while walking around Portland in February!” – Gabe
This entry is going back to Cali … I don’t think so.