Note: Going through the ~2400 photos I took on the Coast Starlight route from LA to Portland still feels daunting; in comparison, going through the ~250 photos I took in Portland felt much more doable, so I decided to go out of order and write this post first.
I arrived in Portland yesterday evening and spent the day in the city. My Coast Starlight train to Seattle was severely delayed so I ended up extending my stay in Portland by a few hours and switching to an evening Cascades train (shorter west coast route that goes from Eugene OR to Vancouver BC).
In true Pacific northwest fashion, Portland is a very, very rainy city. It rains or snows here >150 days of the year (source). To see how other US cities compare, here is a great visualization of the number of days of rain or snow across the cities.
In Portland’s case, the locals seem to have fully embraced rain as a part of their city’s character and figured out how to dress appropriately (i.e., solid rain jacket > umbrella). The photo below attempts to encapsulate this.
Whiling away most of the day at Powell’s Books. Independent bookstores are one of my favorite indoor spaces and luckily for me, Portland is home to Powell’s Books, the self-proclaimed “world’s largest independent bookstore” (source). Given the store was four floors and CNN recommended setting aside “a good two to three days to get lost in this iconic Portland landmark” (source), I believe the claim!
Wandering around Portland and seeing outdoor murals that reminded me very much of Philadelphia. There is a fascinating history of outdoor murals in Portland (source):
In 1998, AK Media, which owned the most billboards in Portland, sued the city for discriminating against advertising by not subjecting outdoor murals to the same sign regulations as advertisements were subject to.The Circuit Court ruled in AK Media’s favor so the city had to choose between not regulating signs or regulating murals as signs.The City chose to regulate murals and commercial adverts the same way limiting murals to 200 sq ft in size, which severely diminished the creation of new murals.The solution the Mayor’s office came up with was to create a Public Arts Murals project wherein the Regional Arts and Culture Council would pay for murals to be created on public wall space. Public art including murals would be exempt from sign regulations because “the City acts as a patron of arts, not as a regulator”.In their report, the Mayor’s office even cited the city of Philadelphia with its “incredibly vibrant collection of public art murals” funded through special public arts programs as an exemplar that Portland should follow!
For more details, read here.
Walking along Governor Tom McCall Waterfront Park and seeing cherry blossoms that gave Washington DC a run for their money. The 100 cherry blossoms trees planted there are much more recent implants to the US than their DC counterparts; they were gifted to the city of Portland in 1990 by the Japanese Grain Importers Association (source)!
Losing track of time and speeding to Portland’s Union Station to catch my Cascades train so I could make it up to Seattle.
Unfortunately, I was in such a rush that I didn’t have time to take good photos of the station itself. If you want a better sense of what the station looked like, here is a photo taken by another traveler that I quite liked: Union Station Portland | Cord Rodefeld | Flickr
P.S. Unintentionally got a train selfie as I was trying to photograph the Interstate Bridge spanning the Columbia River and connecting Portland, Oregon to Vancouver, Washington. This is a pretty accurate depiction of the pose I was in for most of the time I was on a train haha!