One final day in McMinnville, we sat at the Flag and Fire coffee shop planning our day before driving to Portland. Wouldn’t you know it, it was a beautiful sunny day (we’ve had lots of those) and the temperature was going to be 84 degrees. We haven’t had any of those! Some of the wineries we went to had beautiful outdoor patios, one even had a secret garden. We would’ve loved to sip a glass of wine on one of those. It wasn’t meant to be. It was simply too hot.
Our hotel is right downtown Portland, within walking distance to many of the breweries, coffee shops and stores. The first store we went to was Powell Books. It’s huge!!! It covers an entire city block and has a floor devoted to each section – fiction, romance, sci-if, comics, children’s books… They label the floors by color, not dewy decimal system. I’m not sure why. 🤷🏽♀️ We decided to go our separate ways and meet in the lobby in 1 hour. We each could’ve spent a lot more time!
While enjoying a local beer at one of the many breweries, the bar tender started talking about Washington Park. Similar to New York’s Central Park only at the top of the hill in Portland. You can see 7 mountains front the top. Plus, apparently, they have a world famous rose garden. He convinced us to “venture forth” and see it. So we hopped in an Uber (Jon is sick of driving!) and ventured forth. I can’t explain just how beautiful it was. Our timing was prefect. It felt like every single rose was in bloom and the smell was incredible. I will remember that wonderful smell for a long time.
It was really made up of more than one garden. After all you need many gardens to contain over 10,000 rose bushes. They also have a Japanese Garden that’s supposed one of the best outside of Japan. Sadly we got there too late to walk through that one.
We have a big day planned for tomorrow, our last full day of vacation. We planned it from the rooftop patio of our hotel. It was finally cool enough to enjoy such things. I hope the weather cooperates. It’s only supposed to be in the low 70’s but I’d also really like more sunny blue skies.
Halfway Round the Planet, Part 2 