Soon enough it was time so say goodbye to the farmhouse and start adventuring!
The thing that I most wanted to see in Oregon was the Japanese Garden. So that's where we went! After finding a parking spot and paying way more than we needed to to park, we walked up a trail that took us to the entrance of the garden.
We entered the gardens and were just amazed by how beautiful they were! They were so peaceful, oftentimes we just sat down and relaxed on of of the benches.
It was pretty big, so we spent plenty of time there. We took lots of inspiration pictures for our future garden, which we plan to be amazing.
One interesting thing that we noticed was that the workers were using traditional Japanese yard tools, or whatever you would call them. I'm pretty sure a modern rake would have been more effective, but it was definitely cool to see the occasional worker!
Before we left we were sure to hit the gift store because gift stores are my favorite. While there, we couldn't resist buying a bonsai growing kit! It said right on the box that it was something we could enjoy for a lifetime and hand down for generations - how could anyone resist?!
When we were done at the Japanese gardens we were dismayed to discover that we had paid for about two more hours on our parking than we needed to. Not about to waste the parking time, we decided to walk around a little more and see what was in the area. I'm super glad we did, because not too far away were the rose gardens as well as a bunch of trails!
The rose gardens were so amazing - I didn't know that there were so many different kinds of roses! Apparently I forgot to take a picture, but we did enjoy our time there, smelling the roses and trying to figure out what the bump on Bailey's finger was (it was gone by the end of the day, so we still don't know what it was). I did get this picture of us with a leaf, so maybe that counts for something.
By then we felt okay about losing our parking spot, and headed to town to find some food. There was a really good ramen place that I found online that I wanted to hit, so we parked and walked exactly where Siri told us to.... and couldn't find it. We spent a lot of time looking, but eventually had to settle on food truck food. We were so hungry, it was pretty good. But now I can easily say that Utah food trucks are definitely better.
After we ate we walked over to Powell's Books because that's where one of my classmates had told me to visit. On our way there, we found the ramen noodle place...
But anyway, the bookstore was HUGE! In fact, it was pretty overwhelming! I guess it's like the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. At bookstores I can usually spend a good amount of time going up and down every aisle, but there was no way we could go through this bookstore in a single day. So we hit a few aisles, bought a shirt, and called it fabulous.
Being in the heart of the city for even that long was a bit stressful for us, so we decided to spend a relaxing evening at the zoo. I didn't know this, but apparently Bailey has a thing for zoos! So it was a bit disappointing when we went to the zoo... and there were no animals to be found.
We seriously spend the first 20 minutes wondering where the animals were! We had all sorts of theories, our best one being that hippie Portland (hippies make up 98.7% of Portland's population) was taking a stand and making a point that animals shouldn't be kept in captivity or something, and that all of the proceeds were going to animal rescue funds (or "medical" marijuana, that's also very likely). We thought it was a pretty good theory, but luckily we were proven wrong when we left the "forest" section of the park.
Let's see, we saw elephants, mountain lions, gazelles, giraffes, tigers, otters and more. They actually had a pretty good supply! It may have just been the time of the day or something, but all of their animals seemed at least a little bit grumpy. Like this turtle who was not about to make any friends.
Eventually we had to leave all of our cute grumpy friends, and went to check into our new place! We had booked, through Airbnb again, a treehouse. I'll post pictures of our view tomorrow, but you can see the listing here to get a taste of the amazing place. We were surprised by how mid-century it was, but we thought it was super cool! The only weird thing was that the host lived in the upstairs of the place, so it wasn't as separated and private as the places we were used to. But he was a super nice guy, and we enjoyed our stay! Plus we were pretty close to the city, so it was easy to travel there for a nice dinner of hand crafted pasta. Which was delicious!
The rest of the evening was spent laughing over the show Portlandia (it's very accurate) and enjoying the beautiful view of Portland from the glass wall of the treehouse. I love night time city lights!
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