pacific northwest

I have to admit what I had read about Portland before we arrived didn’t excite me terribly. When we drove into the city on Friday, I was forced to re-evaluated my poorly informed opinion. Since Portland is proclaimed the micro-brewery capital of the U.S., we decided to have lunch at a corner bar enjoying one of the local brews. I had been eyeing folks coming in and out of the gelato shop right next door and knew I had to have some. Afterwards we went to one of the best thrift stores I’ve ever been to - the Buffalo Exchange, (located across from a well-known-gigantic-block-wide bookstore) where I proceeded to haul an armload of ridiculously cheap dresses into the dressing room. It was hard to choose just one, and it was fortunate I had a time limit, because I spent every last second there before leaving with my purchase. I thought the city was charming, and definitely could’ve spent more time there then we did.

That night we camped very close to Mt. St. Helen’s, where we decided to spend the day on Saturday. What we hadn’t realized before we arrived was that we were visiting the mount on the 30th anniversary of the “big explosion” weekend. The sites we normally would have had access to through our national parks pass we ended up having to pay for, so didn’t end up seeing everything we hoped to see. Despite that, I was blown away by our beautiful surroundings. Although 30 years is a significant amount of time, biologically it isn’t a huge amount of time. And while you could definitely see the damage the eruption caused years ago, it was beautiful to see all of the new growth still making its way through. There were even a few lakes created by the erupting volcano. I was a bit surprised to feel so touched as we drove around, thinking about how even after destruction occurs, life always prevails.

Saturday evening we pulled into a rest stop just outside of Seattle. Even in the short amount of time we’ve been on this trip, its interesting to see the variety in the quality of rest stops from city to city and state to state. In Texas, there was free wi-fi and beautiful restrooms with automatic everything. In Seattle, there were crowded dirty bathrooms with just the basics. We also took note of the number of what we determined to be homeless people, parking there cars there for the night before heading out the next morning.

The next morning we headed straight to Pike Place Market in Seattle. I would like to spend every day of my life here. One of our first stops in the market was Pike Place Fish - the “famous” seafood shop where the workers toss fish to one another. It was certainly amusing, and the employees looked far happier than any I’ve ever seen. We passed through aisles of fresh produce, huge displays of flowers, and several stores and eateries. Since we were in Seattle, I had to buy my cliché cup of coffee (I passed on the original Starbucks- figured they were getting plenty of money already). For lunch we ate at this delicious place called Piroshky Piroshky for some delicious Russian delicacies. We were also fortunate to be at the market during a cheese festival, and thus stuffed our faces with plenty of it. We encountered several street performers - far more than any city we’ve visited thus far. Some were pretty pathetic, others quite entertaining. One man in particular caught our attention…the Cat Whisperer. He donned a furry cat hat complete with ears, a mini booth (think Lucy from Peanuts), and was giving out advice for cats while accepting donations for his cat sanctuary. He even brought one of his own cats along, who was surprisingly docile. While the Cat Whisperer was a little crazy, he captured my heart, as did Seattle.