Dhammerica – Day Ten

Several people kept asking right thru our sojourn in the US – Why Portland?
As our pics will justify, Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA separated by the Columbia river are amongst the most beautiful places in the US – very green. Portland also has one of the most popular marathons in the US – We will consider running there, when we return to the US, perhaps next year for another marathon.

We were provided with a room of our own and a laptop. How nice! Lovely hosts.
We start the day with some coffee, fixed up by one of our hosts. Next, we go up to a place called Sunrise Bagels for breakfast of bagels (What else!) and coffee. Next we go and visit HP, which has a spectacular campus. Actually we think it is an art gallery with some very fine paintings and some other art, masquerading as a company, only due to some bright engineers working in the same buildings. And there is a profusion of flowering plants.

We are then taken on this superlative drive across the river, to something called the Historic Highway (Washington State Route 14, in the Columbia River Gorge Scenic Area). This is home to over a half a dozen waterfalls (Horsetail Falls, Multnomah Falls and LaTourell Falls), in addition to being a popular fixture for trekkers. Some of our route was also part of the historic journey of Lewis and Clark. We also got educated on the different types of waterfalls by our host as well as some informative boards at each waterfall.

There was also a wonderful curio shop which we had to drag ourselves out of, since we had resolved to not buy any curios on this visit. In fact the only things we bought on this visit were some collectibles from the Art Institute, some tshirts and a coffee mug from Starbucks. But more on that later.

The West Coast leg kicked off a mad frenzy of photography which was limited by the capacity of the camera’s memory card. Twice, we had to delete a few “not-so-important” pics from the 512 MB memory card due to some improper planning.

Lunch was this place which had an “Indian” (the American Indian) setting. Here, our host saved us from potential dharm-bhrast-ing by letting us know that even normal burgers contained meat, except for the garden burger.

We then went to town to this place called “The Lucky Labrador Brew Pub” which is a fine pub-ish kind of place, except that it is well lit and that several families go there with kids, rather like an Indian Coffee House (as our host who had experienced the latter) put it. We had some nice dinner with some Organic IPA (Indian Pale Ale) which is a house beer.

And then we headed home.