Portland

When I first started saying to people all the places I would be visiting on my trip down the west coast, Portland was mostly met with reactions along the lines of "oh" or "where's that?". After visiting, people asked me what kinda fun stuff I did in Portland and what I went to see, all I could answer was that I just sorta hung out in the town centre, and visited a pretty cool book shop.

You'll probably also be thinking that this is gonna turn into one of those blogs where I go on about how disappointing some place is, but in fact, it's gonna be quite the opposite... I loved Portland.

There's just something about the city that I seemed to really latch on to, and I certainly wasn't the only one. The HI Northwest Portland was populated by a lot of people moving from cities across the US trying to find places to live and work in Portland. I must also comment that the HI in Portland definitely wins my award for best hostel so far, it'll take a lot of beating!

Powell's book shop was just something else. It occupied an entire city block, was three floors high, and had books on just about every topic imaginable. Me - I was just happy to spend hours and hours browsing their many photography books. To put it into perspective - they had a section just of Ansel Adams books that was bigger than the entire photography section in Borders in Glasgow. Despite my wanting to limit my carrying weight to as great an extent as possible, I couldn't resist the allure of the shop and ended up buying four books - one exploring creative approaches to photography, a little book of photographs by Lewis Baltz, a collection of Ray Bradbury short stories, and The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

The people in Portland were the one thing that made it my favourite city, and that attitude also seemed to rub off on everyone at the hostel. On my first night proper I met a cool texan guy called James, and Kelley and Francis, a couple whom I would later catch up with in San Francisco. After they left, things got kinda quiet around the hostel, and the inevitable "table for one" meal at a local bar had to be done. Anyways, in the rather excellent 21st avenue Bar & Grill, the waitress Evie must've felt sorry for me and started chatting to me, and before I knew it, I'd been invited along for a few beers with her and her friends Amanda and Joe. Of course, one beer led to a few more, and before I knew it, I was dressed in my kilt dancing like an idiot in a tiny little funk/soul place. I also managed to score a free pedicab ride which was interesting, especially as kilts aren't particularly renowned for their aerodynamics!

If there's one thing I loved most about Portland though, it was the bike culture. It was certainly a very cycle-friendly city, and I enjoyed having a nice perv at all the lovely old steel-framed Bianchis chained to the city's lamp posts. I loved them so much, I've put together an entire dedicated set of photos, which I'll hopefully get round to sticking on my flickr page pretty soon.

So I had lots of fun in Portland, and my next destination would be a small town on the Oregon coast called Seaside.