PORTLAND HOUSES

We have always heard about the cool neighborhoods of Portland, so today we went house gawking.  

We checked out the Laurelhurst neighborhood --lots of Craftsman houses in the area farthest from the park, which looks like a small version of Golden Gate park, houses more from the 20s and 30s nearer the park. I think this is a park designed by the Olmstead Brothers.   Some okay gardens around the Craftsman houses, manicured gardens around the park edge houses.  

We had lunch at Whole Foods -- finally, some vegetables.  Then we moved on to the Dolph neighborhood, which is the Fab 40's of Portland, or at least one such neighborhood.  We walked around there for quite awhile.  Lots of fancy Craftsman houses, a number of Federalist style, etc.  the oddest was a house that had Art Deco lines, but was made of red brick.  Just didn't seem to go together.

 They were getting ready for a block party.  We discussed the possibility of crashing the party, but didn't stay around long enough.  

Our final home visit neighborhood was Irvington.  When we walked up near this house rand the corner, the cat jumped off the porch and ran over to see us as if his tail were on fire and we had a bucket of water.  

The house(s) across the street looked like some kind of a little co-housing affair, with a little community type garden   

This garden was part of a front garden tour, according to the sign.  There were some other signs in the neighborhood that suggested the gardens were something like habitat gardens.  

It's another neighborhood of bungalows.  Some nice gardens here.  The only thing I didn't like was the number of spiders and spider webs.  

I carried a stick to move the spider webs from out In front of me, even though I couldn't always see them, because they were so often there when we walked through places where there were bushes on both sides of the sidewalks.  Yuck.  

There were some interesting smaller modern homes, too.  Very cool.  

Our last stop of the day was an area called Mississippi, because a street of that name runs through it.  It's another hipster haven -- is there anybody under 40 in Portland?  The street had a few cute shops, a gallery, (which was just another cute shop) and a bunch of beer places.  Breweries pop up here like mushrooms, probably because of the rain.  

This is a cool fence in front of a salvage place.  

When we first drove up, we saw yet another little place where people were lined up.  Were these people raised in the old USSR?  Do they just routinely line up for things?  This line was for a little taqueria called Porque No?  We laughed at their in-crowd desires, but later decided to go see what all the fuss was about.  

And waited in line.  There were only two other couples in front of us, though.  It was worth it.  We both had a fish taco and I also had a pastore and John had a chicken adobo.  The fish ones were good enough, but the other two were fabulous.  

Tomorrow we leave Portland.  We've decided to go to Crater Lake on the way home, since it only adds about 40 miles to the trip to medford, and not likely we would go any other way.  I was awake until almost 4 a.m. Last night, so I'll probably be asleep by 9 tonight.