Portland day 1

We woke up pretty early today with lovely sunshine pouring through our bedroom window. It was a nice change from thick hotel curtains that let nothing through. Despite this we took our time getting up and organising breakfast. Mary organised some Donuts so we actually had breakfast and dessert.

We headed out to Washington Park, which is a big park not far from Downtown Portland. We visited the Japanese Garden and the Rose Garden but there is also the Portland Zoo, museums and an arboretum. There are shuttle buses to take people around to the different sites. The Japanese Garden is quite peaceful and well maintained, as you would expect. It also had a couple of fantastic view of nearby Mt Hood. The Rose Garden was very impressive, despite a lot of the roses being a little past there best. Apparently there was a hail storm a couple of days ago.

We then drove into the downtown area and had some Mexican for lunch. After lunch we walked to Powell's Books, which is a large bookstore that takes up a small city block. It is bigger than the bookstore in New York but not quite as impressive. After browsing for a while we headed back to the car, with a short detour for our second helping of donuts. There was a fairly famous donuts shop not far from where we parked. It is called Voodoo Donuts and has been featured on some of the food/travel shows on TV. They were really nice donuts and really cheap.

We had a few lazy hours at home in the afternoon. Nadia and Damien did some overdue laundry and we also had some cheese and drinks. Damien had found a restaurant called XLB - named for Xiao Long Bao (soup dumplings). Everyone was excited by dumplings so we headed out for dinner. It was a very casual place but the dumplings didn't disappoint and the rest of the food was great as well.