Steve was out the door at 4:30 am to run the forty mile Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood. Norah and I acted like normal people on vacation and had a fun day planned in Portland. 🙂 We started off our day with brunch at Screen Door in the Pearl District. We enjoyed our meal and thought it was a cute place. Screen Door is a short walk from Powell’s City of Books, which we knew was a must on our trip to Portland. A bookstore covering a full city block? A bookstore that gives you a map when you enter? Umm, of course! We easily could’ve spent an afternoon here, but thankfully for our wallets we were here for an hour before continuing to the Portland Saturday Market at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. The Portland Saturday market is the largest continuously operating open-air arts and crafts market in the country featuring over 180 local artists and food vendors. We had a lot of fun browsing - there were so many cool booths. In her Tik Tok research, Norah knew she wanted to find the guy who made your face into a garden gnome (officially known as Peter Bluett Sculpture). In the end Norah decided to forgo the gnome, but we watched him craft a gnome for another customer. I was amused and gave Norah a pointed look when I heard him say “yea, someone took a video and put me on Tik Tok and all of a sudden all these young people started showing up”.

We didn’t get a gnome, but had a fun moment while we were at the booth. We noticed a woman and a man also observing the gnome making and I thought she looked like Lisa Ann Walter (a.k.a. Melissa Schemmenti from Abbott Elementary). I knew she was in town because I came across her stand up show that weekend (which we couldn’t attend since it was 21+). After some furious whispering and googling (“how tall is Lisa Ann Walter”) we decided it was probably her. I finally asked and upon confirmation we gushed how much we loved her on Abbott Elementary and the show in general. She had lost her voice and wasn’t talking, but gave us a lovely smile and her companion was nice too. Fun little moment!

We easily could have spent more time at the Portland Saturday Market as well, but we had a timed entry ticket for Hopscotch and grabbed an Uber to get us there in time. Hopscotch is an immersive art collection reminiscent of other venues we have visited such as Meow Wolf (although on a much smaller scale), the Color Factory, the Paradox Museum, or Kusama’s various installations. From Hopscotch’s website: “Hopscotch is an immersive and experiential brand that brings together artists in collaborative environments to create unique, impactful, and distinct shared experiences. We believe art can be a vessel to tell stories and illuminate important messages of the past, present, and future. Hopscotch allows artists to showcase their works in sustainable and creative ways, encourages them to be inspired by new mediums, and empowers them to reach new audiences.” Once we entered Hopscotch, we could spend as much time as we wanted exploring the various rooms. One of our favorites was “Diodic Daydream” - essentially a large, colorful ball pit. The website said most guests spend 60-90 minutes at Hopscotch and this was accurate for us - we spent about an hour and fifteen minutes in the colorful rooms.

A signature of Portland is its food cart scene and we couldn’t leave the city without visiting one of its food cart pods. It worked out that Hopsctoch was a five minute walk from the Hawthorne Asylum Food Cart Pod and we walked over for a snack. The pod was named for the Hawthorne Asylum that operated at this location in the late 1800s. We discussed our next move over bubble tea and pelmeni and decided we had enough time to visit the Japanese Garden in Washington Park. To save time, we took an Uber to our hotel to drop off our bags from Powell’s. We walked to Washington Park and caught the free shuttle to the Japanese Garden. We entered under the Antique Gate and had a lovely time wandering the stone paths and beautiful gardens. I’m really glad we had time to fit in a visit here. In general, Washington Park is really nice and we easily could’ve spent a whole day there visiting the various attractions.

We had a dinner reservation at Toki and some time to kill, so headed back downtown (again using a combination of the free shuttle and walking). Norah spent some time shopping at a thrift store while I watched a demonstration (this felt very on brand for Portland, as well as the guy doing graffiti we spotted in the morning). We still had some extra time and Powell’s was close by - so why not a second visit? We eventually headed to Toki where we had the bao burgers and wing sampler - both were tasty. We finished off the evening with fancy s’mores at the 1927 S’mores Company (super cute space and delicious treats). When we got back to our hotel we got to hear about Steve’s day - it sounded like he had a nice run around Mt. Hood. Our second day was a good one for all of us - one more day left!