Portland is such a beautiful city, I have to say that.
We started our day with a visit to the downtown visitor center in Pioneer Square, a place that would be worth visiting independently from the presence of the Tourist Information Center.
A young lady helped us with a city map, circling for us all the places that she thought would have been interesting for us to see. We already had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do, but didn’t know exactly how to find these places.
She’s was very knowledgeable, except for the fact that she told us the Widmer Brothers Brewing Company had a tour at 2PM this afternoon, and they didn’t, which basically means, we missed the tour of one of my favorite brewing companies in the US, creators of the Widmer Hefeweizen!
Our first stop of the day after Pioneer Square has been the “International Rose Test Garden”. It took us about 30 minutes to get there, but only because there are two ways to get to the gardens, and I obviously picked up the one that today seemed to be the wrong one (it goes through the Zoo, and today the Zoo was a real “jungle” with screaming kids, etc., in a few words, they blocked the road and I couldn’t go through).
Therefore I had to manually convince my GPS to find a different way to take us there to admire the garden, and I did! We arrived there some 15 minutes later, and luckily enough, I found a parking space right in front of the mail entrance!
We spent roughly 90 minutes over there, the smell of the roses was overwhelming, brought back some nice memories of when I used to be a kid and stuck my nose into some rose buds at home only to have my nose stung by some nasty bees (or maybe it was my fault?!?! LOL).
There are over 7,000 rose plants of approximately 550 varieties. The roses bloom from April through October with the peak coming in June, depending on the weather, and this year the lady at the Visitor Center told us we were certainly going to be up for a nice surprise as the Rose Garden was in full bloom.
The interesting thing about the International Rose Test Garden is that new rose cultivars are continually sent to the garden from many parts of the world and are tested for color, fragrance, disease resistance and other attributes. I can easily say without any doubt that virtually any variety of rose existing in this world was there this morning, and we’ve seen them all!
The International Rose Test Garden is the oldest continuously operating public rose test garden in the United States and exemplifies Portland's nickname of the “City of Roses”. An elderly gentleman was conducting a tour of the premises with a group of Asian people, and I listened to what he was saying about the rose garden, and how this tradition with Portland and its roses all started back in the 1900s.
I took over 150 pictures (I’m sure nobody is surprised about that, are you?), and you can see all of them at my Flickr account.
After we left the International Rose Test Garden, the plan was to make a reservation for the Widmer Bros. Brewing Co. Tour of their brewery, but the guy on the phone kindly told us that we were a little too late for that. That left me with a craving for beer that brought us back to downtown Portland, in the Pearl District, which is also where several different brewpubs are.
We opted for the Deschutes Brewery where we sat outside on a bench in typical English pub style. It was hot and sunny, and I eventually ended up burning the tip of my nose as usual!
We ordered to Belgian Style Wheat “Wit” beers, and a large soft pretzel that came together with a steamy hot cream cheese dipping sauce. Stupid as I can be at times, I couldn’t wait for it to cool down, and also ended up burning the roof of my mouth. Oh well, I can’t even say “lesson learned” as I know I will do it again, and again, and again, real soon…Thank God I had my wheat beer with me, that always have some miraculous healing effects on me.
After that we decided to take a walk, and not too far away, maybe a block or two, we found “Powell’s City Of Books” which claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world.
The store takes up a whole city block, and it shelves all books, used and new side by side. This is one of those funny places I’m always looking for, with the exception that this one actually has a cultural value because of the books.
Powell’s City Of Books is so big that it has several different information points in the inside, and you can get a store map so that you don’t get lost, and to be able to better find books you might be interested in. Every section is identified by a different color; Travel (yes, I spent the whole day in the Travel section dreaming about future travels!) for example is in red.
We had dinner at P.F. Chang this evening, consistently good as always, both food and service.
Tomorrow we should be visiting some more of the city of Portland, and then head north to Seattle, which should be (unless we make it to Vancouver) our northernmost stop in the continental United States.
Good night from the City Of Roses (and Brewpubs I should add),
Nico
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