A Portland Vacation: Day 1

Portland! We had finally arrived in Portland, one of my favourite American cities. Portland, the city where people in their twenties go to retire. Portland, where the dream of the 90s is still alive.



This is what I'm talking about.



Or maybe we're talking about the 1890s

Contrary to the impression I've probably given so far, I have actually visited Portland before and know stuff about it beyond the TV show Portlandia.  I remember visiting family friends there as a teen, and posing beside the giant Nike icon on the Nike campus, and five years ago, I took the train down from Vancouver to explore the City of Coolness.  I was happy to be back here again.

Portland is so cool. I feel like everything that is cool to us now started in Portland: the organic local farm food movement, food trucks, coffee, microbrewery beers, hipster beards, craft fairs, silkscreened baby onesies, certain fonts and graphic design styles. Maybe not all the cool trends started in Portland, but they certainly all thrive there.

Take this as an example. When our taxi pulled up to the curb at our hotel the Sentinel, there was loud club music coming out of the hotel, as well as a lineup wrapped around the block behind a velvet rope. Turns out the bar at our hotel, Jackknife, happened to be one of the most happening hotspot on a Saturday night in the city. Unlike the places where I usually spend my time, we were in the centre of coolness.

The lovely Sentinel Hotel

Look at all the cute kitschy things the hotel has, just in the lobby alone

food trucks!

KEEP PORTLAND BIRD

When I woke up, I was so excited to be in the city that I decided to go for a run, taking in the sights of the city along the way.

 RUGS

 South Park

Tree art

Tom McCall Waterfront Park

As I jogged along the river, I was so enthralled with the waterfront scenery that I didn't notice my hotel key card had fallen out of my pocket.  A gentleman passerby saw it drop and tried to get my attention. "Miss!" he called out.

I kept jogging down the path.

He began to run after me. "Miss! Miss!"

I pulled out a camera and began to take photos, composing a love poem to Portland in my mind. It wasn't that I was ignoring him or running away from him because I thought he was creepy. I was just lost in thought.

"Miss!"

Eventually I tuned back in to realize that he had followed me down the whole path just to return my hotel card. I thanked him but he was too out of breath to respond.

People are really nice in Portland.

 Portland is also ready to meet your spiritual needs

Then I found palm trees!

Portland palm trees

Back at the hotel, we decided to properly start the day off with the three dollar mimosas offered at Jake's Grill.

the price is right

I love the old-timey look of this bar

We were looking forward to checking out the famous brunch scene in Portland, but for that morning, we thought we'd check out the Saturday Market and eat there.  It was actually Sunday, but luckily the Saturday Market is not actually restricted to just Saturdays.  

There was all sorts of food available, including nepalese, Polish, Thai...I ended up buying a Mexican pupusa which was delicious with homemade pineapple juice. Fruit! How I missed fresh fruit.

 When people in Nunavut visit Portland...

We passed by the famous Voodoo Donuts, which also had a lineup around the block. That seems to be the theme for Portland: "Waiting In Line For An Hour For Food". We didn't, though.

Instead, for the evening, we decided to check out the Portland City Grill, located in a tall skyscraper with tasty dishes which were luckily cheap during happy hour.

I love that Portland is all about the happy hour. The idea, I guess, is to offer food and drinks at a cheap price during the slow hours of the restaurants and bars. Because I am not that cool (and maybe not cool enough for Portland), I am more than happy to munch away at the unhip hour of 5PM in the afternoon if it means the plates are at half price.  Then I can order everything off the menu (and end up spending more money than if I ate during Unhappy Hour instead).

But really, we were here for the spectacular view.

It was so lovely to have a drink and watch the sun go down over the whole city.

 

Portland, I'm going to love you.

Continue on to Day 2 here
You can also read about Day 3 here

how to recover from Friday

When I woke up in the morning, I had the vague sense that I had committed to do something that day that was going to be important to remember. What was it?

 We had stayed up late the night before, talking to folks at the Elks Lodge.  There were all sorts of random folks out that night: a reporter from my favourite magazine, scientists, staff employees of a private super-yacht belonging to the super-rich co-founder of Microsoft (the largest expedition yacht is not something to be sneezed at), a young birthday girl, and a dark-haired guy who claimed to often be mistaken for Jake Doyle back in St. John's. The night had begun with karaoke, and wrapped up with the birthday girl and her cousin performing throat-singing to an unusually hushed audience.  Cambridge Bay in all its glory.  By the time I went to bed, I had friends who were waking up for their early Saturday morning activities.

Now I was squinting into my alarm clock wondering why eleven-thirty had been etched into my brain by Friday Night Gloria as a significant time to be remembered by Saturday Morning Gloria.  I was supposed to be somewhere by 11:30. But where?

Oh crap. I said I'd jump into the Arctic ocean again.

Why did I promise to do that?  Why does Friday Night Gloria make such promises about Saturday Morning Gloria?  Maybe nobody would remember I had said that I would do that.  But then the text messages and online messages reminding me to be at the dock told me otherwise. Everybody remembered.

I think this is how the conversation started. Some science-types guys at the Elks were doing some work, setting up cameras in the waters to track the fish in the ocean. They were diving in wetsuits.  One of the local residents may or may not have teased them that they have not really lived until they felt the chill of the Arctic Ocean directly on their bare skin, and if tonight's your last night in town, why don't you try doing it tomorrow morning at eleven-thirty before your plane leaves? And so they found themselves committing to this crazy deed.

crazy people getting ready to do crazy things

Actually, that doesn't explain at all how I got involved. I don't remember how I got roped into it.  All I knew was I was going to be there, pouring tea into a thermos bottle at the docks, ready for a whole world of pain.

It was 1°C that morning with a wind chill of -4°C. The Arctic Ocean itself was 3°C.  Some readers may remember that I had already done the Polar Bear Dip this summer as part of a fundraiser. But this was under different circumstances.  At that time, it was the warmest day of the year, and there were paramedics waiting at the side of the road in case anything happened, and also there was hot coffee being poured for us after we came out of the water.  Now, it was starting to turn towards winter, since we had already gotten our first snowfall, and there was nobody around except this one Inuk man in his pickup truck, laughing at us.

 

Oh, but we did it anyway.

 

 

And it was cold, and it was painful. We didn't linger very long in the ocean. You couldn't blame us. It was the Arctic Ocean.  We did it on what was basically a drunken dare. But hey, we did it.  Probably won't do it again. This year, anyway.

Jumping into the Arctic Ocean is one way to clear your groggy head after a lively Friday. Another creative solution I tried was going for a brisk run.  I had forgotten that I was planning to do the Northwest Run for Diabetes. Had I remembered that this was scheduled for the same Saturday, I might have eased up a bit the Friday night before and gone to bed earlier.  And heck, I might not have also committed to an Arctic swim hours before.  But I am not a quitter. Groggy head aside, i was going to do the run.

 

Participants warm up for their run. Parka hoods are one great way to warm up

 

Lots of the local kids participated

These runs are different in the North than the marathon races that you see in the South. For one thing, as I mentioned, it was -4°C with the windchill that day, so you have to dress appropriately and consider that you might not be able to run for as long as, say, if you were running in temperature above zero. Also, this run was less about raising money for those living with diabetes, and more about promoting awareness about diabetes to encourage a healthy lifestyle, to target the folks that were primarily at risk of diabetes.  The kids in particular really enjoyed it, and despite all the factors that took away from this run having optimal conditions (the cold weather, the groggy head, the pre-run swim), I was glad I took part.

 

 

Took this obligatory selfie with my participation medal, and then napped for the rest of the afternoon