Portlandia

Chuck and I have been planning to visit Portland all summer and finally got to make it happen this past weekend! We found out several of the Sloanies/LGOs in Seattle had a trip planned so we made a last minute decision to join them, and headed out early Saturday morning.

Portland is only about a 2.5-3 hour drive from Seattle. We got in town just in time for our lunch reservations at Pok Pok, a very popular Portland spot that serves authentic Thai food. We ordered several dishes and did it up family style. It was tasty! 

After lunch, Chuck and I split from the group and met up with our friend Tacy, another LGO, who graciously offered her floor to us for the weekend.  She's living in Portland and doing her off-cycle internship for Nike. Tacy and her fiance lived on the same floor as us in Eastgate last summer and live one floor above us in the apartment building where we live in Cambridge now. We are housing buds, so it was only fitting that we stayed with her for the weekend! 

We found a parking spot for the car, dropped our stuff at her apartment, and headed out into downtown Portland to meet up with some her Nike friends to go to an International Beer Festival. 

We paid an entrance fee and for that we each received a small glass and 10 tickets. Once inside, you could walk up to any tent and hand over your ticket to taste whatever beer they were serving. I have no idea what beers we drank or where they were from but most of them were pretty good. 

Chuck liked them!

Then we asked a nice lady in line behind us to take our picture and totally got photobombed. But we loved it.

We actually thanked the guy for making our picture that much more awesome.

After the beer festival my phone died so unfortunately I have no pictures of the group we were with, the place we ate dinner, or anything after that. But I can pretty much sum up the evening with "more beer and a lot of pizza."

Which leads us to Sunday morning... when I wasn't feeling so well from the aforementioned beer festival.... So we had a little bit of a late start to the day but it turned out ok. Tacy drove us to see the Rose Garden which we loved. 

Rows and rows of just beautiful, huge roses of all different colors and shapes. It was so peaceful and pretty.

Then Tacy drove us to Nike Headquarters in Beaverton where she's working and drove us around. Chuck had seen a lot of the campus when they visited Nike back in January on Plant Trek but I obviously hadn't seen any of it before. Their campus is ginormous and amazing. There are huge buildings, courts and fields for pretty much every sport, walking trails, trees... It was really cool to see and hear about the work culture there from someone who's experiencing it firsthand.

From there we went shopping at the Nike Employee Store where employees can by brand new merchandise for 50% off. :):):):)

After our shopping spree we headed back to leave the car again and get lunch at a place called Lardo. Not an appetizing name for a restaurant but the food was delish. Then we drove to the place that EVERYONE says you HAVE to go when you're in Portland- Voo Doo Donuts.

But the line was REALLY long and the sun was REALLY hot, so we decided not to wait. We walked through the Saturday Market (which I questioned the name of, seeing as it was Sunday...) and then down the river. 

From there, we went to the Niketown Portland, as if we hadn't had enough Nike in our day already! But I wanted to see what their store is like in comparison to the one in Seattle and and Tacy wanted to see their current shoe selection. When we finished at Niketown, we walked back to Voo Doo Donuts and discovered the line was much shorter and half of it was now in the shade, so we decided to wait in the line and get some donuts for the road trip back to Seattle. We waited about 30 minutes but it was worth every second. 

I mean, who WOULDN'T wait in line for a donut that has Captain Crunch on top of it?!

And that was how we ended our trip! I think our Portland visit was pretty successful but my only regret is that I never got a good picture of Mt. Hood. Also, we never got a picture with Tacy in it! What were we thinking? The good news is, Tacy is planning to come up to Seattle this weekend so we will have another chance to get pictures then!