Ross Cooper's blog

The non-adventures of Ross, Sally & Boo

Portland - Tiki Style

Media_httpwwwblogrosscoopscomuploadedimagesp1030471739900jpg_gjdlgtezxyterjb
Saturday ended up being our most depressing day of the whole trip, but we realized in retrospect that it was because it included the least friends spread out through the day. It started out great as Heather cooked us a great breakfast, just ham & eggs, but soooo yummy. It ended good too, but we'll get to that later...

After breakfast we headed downtown. It was still freezing cold and oscillating between rain and hail. I used to love Portland's downtown, but now it seems like half the shops have closed and with the miserable weather everything just looked grey and yucky. We cheered ourselves up with lunch at Rock Bottom before heading up to the 21st/23rd shopping areas. We were going to walk around but we were so cold by now that we just drove down the streets until I saw a cool new store called eccodoma. We checked it out and they had some amazing furniture in there. We ended up buying a chinese painting that we liked, then driving to the nearest UPS store to ship it home to Phoenix. Painting: $80, shipping: $80.56, loathing UPS: priceless ;-)

We headed back to Ronnie & Heather's for a bit and it really started to hit home why we left Portland in the first place. It is beautiful in the summer, but if you don't like the cold and rain it gets depressing fast in the long winters. We decided to cheer ourselves up with pie, so it was off to Perry's on Freemont which does amazing desserts. Sally was all excited to have her favorite old dessert again that she hadn't had in 2 years... but they'd taken it off the menu :-( Curse you again Portland!

Some things however never change, and one of them was our final destination for the night - The Alibi. It's an old (50's? 60's?) tiki bar that hasn't changed a day since they built it. The drinks are bad, but lethal. The food is bad, but lethal. They have karaoke. It's just about my favorite 'escape from the winter weather' dive in Portland. A huge bunch of friends showed up, some who had been out the night before at Kat's wedding, and some who I hadn't seen in years (like Ange and Desi). It was great to see you all and totally rescued an otherwise crappy day. I don't miss Portland anymore, but I do miss all of you.