Portland court house | Our Waldo Bungie

Thanks for bearing with me as I took a week off from blogging…things have been kind of hectic in our neck of the woods! Let’s finish out our Portland trip so we can get back to DIY and the doggies…which I know is why most of you check in here anyway!

Day 5 was meant to be our Mt. Hood day. We still had our rental car, and wanted to explore a little more outside of Portland after our successful trip to the coast the day before. It was raining when we headed out, but we were unfazed. How can you be fazed when your view out the car window was this?

Our first stop on the way to Mt. Hood was Multnomah Falls – a beautiful waterfall right off the highway in the Columbia River Gorge. Even though it was pouring down rain, the trails up to the falls were packed with tourists and hikers just enjoying the view.

We didn’t walk all the way to the top, but we did grab a couple photos to prove we were there…

Our GPS System assured us we could get to Mt. Hood by traveling along the historic Columbia River Highway, so while it was a longer route, we opted to give it a try. For the next 2 hours, we drove on roads that I am pretty sure we not meant for tourists, and more than once I made references to Twilight that Daniel ignored. Although we felt completely isolated and more than a little worried we may never find our way home – the view made that crazy drive worth it.

Unfortunately, it was too cloudy to actually see Mt. Hood – so we ended up back in Portland pretty early.

No worries though, we spent our evening walking along the Eastbank Esplanade, which is a biking and walking path that extends from the Steel Bridge to the Hawthorne Bridge along the Willamette River. While the view was spectacular…

Daniel mostly enjoyed capturing my impersonations of Kristen Wiig doing “Gilly.”

We made our way across the bridge into downtown, but not before snapping a few photos of the iconic “Portland” sign:

Right under the sign, we found one of the Benson Bubblers, which are unique water fountains found only in Portland and donated to the city by lumber baron Simon Benson (supposedly because he got annoyed with his employees getting drunk on the job and claiming they had to drink beer because there was no fresh water readily available to them).

On Day 6, we headed back into downtown to do a bit more exploring. Unfortunately, our camera battery had died and we didn’t know it. Luckily, I was able to get a couple photos with my cell phone. My favorite photo was of Portlandia, the statue that looks out over the entrance to the Michael Graves’ Portland Building. She is the second largest copper repoussé statue after the Statue of Liberty. Pretty cool, huh?

We also checked out the Portland Court House:

and the Portland Theater:

By far my favorite stop was Powell’s Books, which is a massive bookstore in the heart of downtown Portland that is filled with millions of books. I could have spent hours there, but managed to keep our trip pretty short for Daniel’s sake. Man, it was cool though.

We also visited our last food cart of the trip: Addy’s Sandwich Bar.

We really enjoyed visiting the different food carts over the course of our trip – we were able to experience delicious breakfast sandwiches, freshly squeezed fruit juice, Chinese egg rolls, Mexican sopapillas, and gourmet sandwiches – all from different food carts! We figured it was only natural to have our last Portland lunch come from a food cart. So we enjoyed our sandwiches from Addy’s in the square by the Court house and reminisced over our week in Portland.