portland

We decided back in the winter that we wanted to go to Portland and Seattle to celebrate our year anniversary, which isn’t until October 4. But we went in September for two reasons. 1: we heard that was the best weather. And 2, which is the main reason: LSU played Washington in Seattle (more on that tomorrow!)

For some reason we have always wanted to go to these two cities and we had fun in both, but today I’m blogging our Portland trip via photos. Here’s your tour…

We stayed at the super cool Jupiter Hotel where we had a chalkboard door! I want one in our next house.

We crossed the Willamette River everyday to get downtown.

Portland has 10 distinctive bridges spanning this river which has given the city the nickname “Bridgetown.” Here was our favorite taken with the Lensbaby…

Some Lensbaby action to the famous Made in Oregon sign…

The arm extended self portrait is vital for vacay.

The Bridgeport BrewPub is Portland’s oldest microbrewery. It was the first place in my life that I enjoyed an Extra Pale Ale.

Mark gets lots of photos taken of him when we travel.

We visited Portland’s Classical Chinese Garden. It’s the biggest Suzhou-style garden outside of China!

While we were there, we went into a neat little room where you could discover your fortune. “Fortune cookies are fun,” I thought, so we did it. Basically, there is a huge dresser of about 50 drawers and on top of it, a jar with sticks in it. You hold the jar out from you parallel to the ground and shake it. Whatever stick falls out or clearly comes out the most, you grab. On the stick is a number. Whatever number your stick has you find that drawer from the chest. We got number 31 and found this fortune inside that read You will soon receive important news that could affect your residence. Now by no means do I ever take fortunes seriously, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t freak out a little. (3 days later, we found out Mark got the job in Georgia!)

We also went to Deschutes Brewery, which we liked a lot more than Bridegport.

We did a lot of other awesome stuff that is just too much to blog, but one of our favorite things was the personal tour of Nike my friend Ryan gave us! Ryan and I had Rec and Leisure classes together at UNT and became friends. He’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met and his wife Mary is also a blast. They took us out one night for a good time in Portland and then on Labor day, Ryan took us to Nike. That place is WHOA! Ryan is a designer for Jordan, which is beyond amazing, and we got to see a lot of stuff that I can’t even tell you about because I’d literally have to kill you.

The campus is HUGE, complete with soccer fields, tennis courts, gyms, gardens, you name it, they got it. It was a fun way to spend our last day!

Tomorrow I’ll blog the Seattle portion of our trip!!