Portland Saturday

After the insane heat of last weekend (well, relatively insane), there were four days of rain and today was sunny and warm. The Oregonians were pleased and did what Oregonians do on such weekends:

They went to play outside.

And I joined them. I’m an indoor girl, if you can’t tell by all the crafting and other sedentary activities I mention here. But today I felt like going outside and staying out, so I took advantage of that. (I’ll pause to allow anyone who knows me to recover from their heart attacks.) I drove up to Sellwood Park, which I had never been to, got lost along the way and ended up with my PDX brethren enjoying the sun and cool breeze.

I took a walk along the Willamette  River to the Sellwood  Bridge, which is sadly crumbling, and took a few photos, which are on my flickr account, for those who are interested in such things.

Lots of people were out on rental boats and kayaks in the river, dogs were swimming from boat launches and tons of little kids running on the grass, all living in the spirit of harmony. I missed my dearly departed Australian Shepard, Shiloh, who would have loved fetching tennis balls and sticks thrown out in the river with the other dogs. He loved to swim out at Lake Meade in Nevada, but hated the ocean when he lived with me in San Diego, so I think the river would have been his speed. Le sigh.

A French or Moroccan guy (hard for me to tell, pardon) saw me taking pictures and told me that downtown could be seen from the floating dock, so I took a few pictures from the river. Some people say that Portland has the ugliest skyline in the Northwest, and I say that some people are full of crap. I heart the KOIN tower, so there.

I got lost again going home after a few hours in the park, which is fine since that’s the way to learn to get around a new city, but I found my way quite by accident. After uploading the Sellwood Park batch of photos, I still craved the outdoors. Am I really me? Have I been body snatched? So I picked up my knitting bag and headed off to the cliff top park in Oregon City I found last week, and have since found out is called McLaughlin Promenade.

I found a nice little nook under the trees on a flat rock and settled in to work on my Hidcote Garden Shawl and realized… I had forgotten the pattern! Doh! It’s not a shawl that you can wing it on, so I worked a little in my writing journal (yes, despite the lackluster content of this blog, I do aspire to write).

I very much looked like one of “those girls” sitting on a rock writing in a journal, but it didn’t stop me.

I felt like walking a little further, and of course, this is Oregon, so it started to sprinkle just as I got to the Elevator.

I had heard about the Elevator (officially the Oregon City Municipal Elevator) before, but had apparently never looked up. I’d never seen this spaceship looking thing before. It was opened in the 1950’s, which explains the Starship Enterprise construction, and was made to bring people up and down the cliff without having to climb up the hill from… I think it’s 10th St. Don’t quote me. It kept raining and I kept walking. The light rain didn’t seem to bother anyone else, so I resolved to get my inner Oregonian back and tough it out.

I love this. I live in a town with an actual barber shop, complete with rotating pole. How retro is that?

It started pouring soon after I took this photo, so I ducked into a coffee shop and had a cup of Stumptown coffee (yum!) while waiting out the rain. I read Sartre while I sipped and looked like one of those girls again. Still didn’t stop me.

There it is. My Saturday.