Portland lessons

We spent a nice weekend in Portland, like we did last October (escape-to-portland).  

It was sunny and at least 10 degrees warmer than Seattle.  It was kind of thrilling to ride the train, which departs from a station only a few blocks from our apartment.

Saturday afternoon we ventured to the east side of the Willamette, where we saw a nice walking path along the river.  It was ridiculously challenging to get on to the path however, because there are all kinds of freeways and car bridges and pedestrian underpasses, which don't actually take you down to the ground level.    After finding ourselves at a dead end underpass that left us hanging a frustrating 15 feet directly above the path we were aiming for, we had to detour about 3/4 of mile to actually get back to that point on the path.   The good news is that the detour took us by a board game store that sold used games (sales-tax free, of course).   That was fun.

We drew two conclusion about Portland from this weekend.
1) If you stay in the fancy new downtown area, you have the impression that the city really has it together.  The transit looks good, there are great sidewalks, public toilets, civic art and even drinking fountains.  You might start wondering how they pay for it all.   If you cross the river, all of that changes.   You'll be walking under endless ramps with nary a public toilet or a library to be found.
2)  Portland is the smokiest city we've been to in a long time, and we went to Hong Kong pretty recently.  I would say that about 50% of the people outdoors were smoking.   I don't know how we missed this fact last year.

Despite these things, we had a really nice weekend.