If you've been following my Instagram at all, you'd know my family took a quick vacation down to Portland, our fellow Pacific Northwest "weird" city. Kenji was signed up for a three-week training camp sort of deal just a couple hours away, so we all decided to keep driving south and to stay a couple nights in Oregon.
NO SALES TAX
Coming from a state with a 9.8% sales tax, I can completely appreciate this no-tax rule. So it's pretty hard not to go shopping when you're faced with this temptation. We ended up buying a couple of raincoats (gotta prep for that upcoming autumn, right?) from Columbia and tons of stuff at Powell's bookstore, which is the largest new and used bookstore in the world. It was seriously like every book lover's heaven over there.I got a new raincoat and some books by Ray Bradbury and Oscar Wilde, so I'd say that our shopping trip was very successful. And of course, I had to stock up on Portland souvenirs for future reference and memories.
HOTEL CHILLIN'
There was also a good chunk of time devoted to napping during this trip, as much as I hate to admit. But the hotel we stayed at was located downtown, so everything was so close by (walking distance!) and it cut down a lot of the time spent traveling. We all found ourselves with a lot of time on our hands, and I'm glad that some of it was spent just relaxing in the air-conditioned hotel that was The Paramount.Most of this was due to the part that this vacation was a predominantly food-related trip where all we did was eat and shop (which is only the best kind of vacation, of course). So we needed time to digest all those meals... More on that on my next post!
