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Portland, Oregon: Walk, Look Around, Enjoy
Portland may well be the better for not being its version of Gotham On The Water. It can be itself. And itself is plenty. This is a big city that has a small town feel. You almost expect to find Andy Griffith and Don Knotts running the sheriff’s department; this is as close to Mayberry as a major American city can get. Even the city dogs seem happy in this green city. Portland has so many resident-friendly touches such as a strong presence of 238 “Zipcars,” small cars that can be rented by the hour or day and have designated convenient parking locations all over town. As well as multiple, health-inspected ethnic food carts all over the city that just about everyone uses for their convenience. And a walking area along the waterfront to make nature-lovers indulgently smile as if they know something visitors don’t, namely “This is the place!”
Indeed this is the place if you can handle winter which is why, of course, we came in July. Summer is a great time to visit the markets; Portland has two! One the Saturday Market which is open also on Sunday and the Farmers Market near Portland State University which is open on Saturday. Confusing? Not really, just tell the natives you bump into on the street what you want and they’ll willingly direct you. If you have only enough time on a Saturday to visit one go for the Farmers Market. When, for example, did you go to a farmers’ market and hear someone playing the harp? It’s really what Portland is all about: organic food and pleasant if intense “green” people who are rather -- corny as it sounds – lovable. When you go to the Saturday Market, on Sunday perhaps, it gives you a chance to walk along their great Willamette river waterfront and watch local families enjoy their city.
While you’re looking at boats that seem to be cool continue up the shorefront a little more and check out the Notice all the people walking and cycling and just enjoying nature. They are standing on what in 1974 was a six-lane highway! It was bulldozed to create the park and the Says Marcus Hibdon, communications and public relations manager of Travel Portland, “We have more than 200 It is not just city employees who brag about Portland. Here’s a friend who lives there, Steve Satterlee, giving his views: “Anything new built here has to be oriented towards the use of public transportation; Portland has validated mass transit. It’s made our neighborhoods vibrant. New businesses must open to the street on the ground floors on every block.” Then he delivers his special compliment, “We are more European than most American east coast cities!”
The OMSI (the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) isn’t the easiest complex to find; it’s across the river in the southern part of town but is worth a visit, again especially if you have children with you. The Omnimax/IMAX theater is there and you can check out a submarine but the attraction at the time of our visit was the traveling CSI exhibit; a program where you are given one of several crime scenes to investigate, lab assistance to solve the crime that was incredibly popular with all ages. Several adults clearly were going through it for a second time. “Hey! Different crime scene!” one of them said sheepishly when teased by his buddies.
There’s more to see but often there’s not enough time. Portland has a zoo, a children’s museum, an art museum, a 1914 National Historic Register property, the Pittock Mansion and of course about 15 miles south in historic Oregon City the experience that is the “End of the Oregon Trail.” We had driven up our trail from San Diego mostly staying at Motel 6s for a quick overnight -- the economy is hurting travel writing, too, but for a more comfortable longer stay we went with the two Provenance Hotels in town, the Hotel Lucia at 400 SW Broadway then the Hotel deLuxe at 729 SW 15th Avenue. We’d stayed at a sister hotel in Tacoma, the Hotel Murano and really enjoyed its distinctive glass art as we mentioned in our Tacoma article. The Hotel Lucia’s art is quite different but still fascinating: an intimate display of the photography of David Hume Kennerly who, after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, became the official photographer to President Gerald Ford and shot many scenes at the White House. The hotel has 680 of those images. Kennerly has shot more than 35 covers for Time or Newsweek and he has photographed every president since Richard Nixon. His famous photograph of Five Presidents hung on our corridor war. Photographed by author courtesy Hotel Lucia
Somehow we don’t think the painting in the lobby is of three presidents!
The sister hotel for Hotel Lucia the Hotel deLuxe is younger -- slightly: it saw birth in 1912 as the Mallory.
A Weekend Drive If you have a car, consider the 60-mile rural scenic loop west out of town around the wineries of Washington County. It matters not whether you go clockwise after King City starting at the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, itself worth a visit, or come in from the north on Highway 26 and start with the Rice Museum then look for wineries in an anticlockwise loop. It doesn’t matter because, in contrast to Yamhill County to the west, the wineries in Washington County are not well marked from the highways and you’re probably going to end up calling the wineries themselves to ask for directions. But first the Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals. You must visit it. It’s like a small Smithsonian, essentially the gift to the American North West from long time rock collectors Richard and Helen Rice whose former 1952 bungalow the museum now occupies. Whatever you want to see it’s here. Petrified wood, agate, fossils, meteorites, dinosaur eggs, GOLD!
We stopped off at three wineries in Washington County. We’d have made our way to more if we’d thought to print Google maps for the ones we wanted to see. We started with Ponzi Winery near the wildlife refuge, a winery, like most, a family concern. Together the Ponzis learned the principles of winemaking. And they discovered Pinot Noir. “Pinot is a thin skinned grape that needs gentle handling. It hs to be harvested by hand,” says Jeff Mathews, Ponzi’s tasting room manager. Ponzi has a staff of 15 for the harvest. This location has many benefits: the Cascade Range separates it from Eastern Washington which is hotter and drier, yet the Coastal Range protects it from getting too much rain. “If the coast gets 80 inches in a year, we get 40 inches,” says Mathews. He offers his tasting guests a glass of 2008 Rosato, made from free-run Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. He’s particularly proud of it because it was a “magical vintage where a cool spring delayed bud-break, and the season remained cool until we had a really sunny summer and a gorgeous Indian summer. We didn’t pick till October so we had a long hang time.” We nodded as if we understood it all and sipped the wine. Mmm. We headed then for Montinore Estate thinking with a name like that surely the Italians had conquered the valley. Turned out that the 230 acre vineyard occupies land once owned by one John Corbis in the 1890s. He also held land in Montana so he called his Oregon possession “MONTana IN OREegon. Cool! Rudy Marchesi bought the winery in 2005. Marc, the tasting room manager, explained the winery’s beliefs on winemaking. “Organic farming means no pesticides or fertilizers. The next standard up: biodynamic is tougher. We believe that 80 percent of winemaking is done in the vineyard. Just as in golf you to try to reduce your handicap, in wine making you try remove the handicap of fruit that is not healthy.” Makes sense and the professionals say it works and improves both grape quality and consumer health.
We then somehow discovered David Hill Vineyard and Winery maybe about five miles somewhere to the north. We learned later it might have been an easier road if we’d come in from the other direction, the east. But we were standing at the wine tasting counter chatting to Michele Andrich, the tasting room manager, when a Portland tourist came in grumbling about the county’s lack of significant road signs. “Did you get lost as well?” we asked.
The wine tasting room is in the 1883 farmhouse of what was once Rueter’s Farm. Some vines were planted then but torn out at the time of Prohibition. Charles Coury replanted the vineyard in 1965 mostly with Pinot Noir making the David Hill vineyard the oldest post-Prohibition planting of Pinot Noir in the state. Asked why visitors come to her tasting room, Michele replies, “We’re special because of our age, plus we have this wonderful view of the valley. And all of the vines we use are on site.” Jason Bull, the winemaker comes in. “Most of our visitors come from word of mouth: he says. “Our mailing list is four times what you’d expect it to be. We virtually sell out each year, every year. We’re not in Yamhill county so we have no cult status. We don’t charge a tasting fee, we offer good service and great wines. And we are great fun!” We believe it.
In some ways McMenamins mirrors Portland: a fun place that is what it is without pretentions, off sometimes in its own world but honest -- as in the clichéd “what you see is what you get.” Portland, we’ll be back!
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Talk to anyone in Olympia or Tacoma, Washington and even Portland, Oregon and they all seem to see Seattle as the elephant in the room, the Godzilla of the Pacific Northwest. It’s all part of the area’s maritime history. In the good old days before trains, interstates and airplanes a city’s future depended on becoming a major port. That prize was snagged up by Seattle and there’s never a second chance to get back to the good old days.
steamer Portland: that’s the Oregon Maritime Museum moored at Tom McCall Waterfront Park and it’s conveniently near the Saturday Market. But take a look at this park, this green stretch with an esplanade that runs along the west bank of the Willamette. The city has 12 bridges crossing the Willamette river. Ten of them are pedestrian friendly.
federal government permitted Portland to divert freeway millions to mass transit. The park is named after the former journalist and two-term governor whose actions started Oregon on its green journey. Tom McCall is a beloved name in Oregon. He gave the state its famous Oregon Water Bill, its public ownership of beaches on the Oregon coast and its farsighted urban growth boundaries that prevented urban expansion on farm and forest land, prevented urban squalor and helped keep core downtown areas alive. It’s hard for a visit to Portland not to become a love affair with the city when you look around and see how attractive, convenient and useful the two free public transit systems are and find how Portland has embraced bicycles (one percent of the transit budget is dedicated to bicycling). 
miles of bike lanes and, every day, 5000 bicycles cross the Morrison Bridge as commuters go to work. Portland has eight times the national average for people commuting by bicycle. Why? Because we have the infrastructure in place.” Hibdon clearly loves his city. “We’re a friendly place,” he says. “Look at our restaurants. Most are owned by their chefs. Indeed most of our businesses are owner operated. And our 5000 acre Forest Park is the largest urban forested area in the U.S” 
This reverence for nature shows in the popularity of visitor attractions such as the 5.5 acre Portland Japanese Garden and the city’s famous International Rose Test Garden. The Rose Garden has “10,000 plantings of 550 varieties; the oldest public garden of its type in the United States.” Strolling around those gardens seems the perfect way to communicate with this city – and its people. Because the charming thing is that it’s not just visitors who are enjoying the scenery, it’s the locals, whole families of them. While you are down in the park in the southern part of the city you should visit the interactive World Forestry Center Discovery Museum especially if you have children. The train outside shows you where it is. There are hands-on activities they will enjoy from simulated river rafting to pretending you are a smoke jumper in the fire service. You can even get hoisted in harness 45 feet above the floor into a tree canopy.
The 
Provenance Hotels’ success in restoring both surely is impressive although you’ll be pleased to use the deLuxe’s bell hops when you open its front door and survey a long flight of steps up to a first floor lobby. But the lobby of the deLuxe is delightful whether the mammoth ever-changing images on the lobby screen show Frankie and Dino -- or James Stewart and Donna Reed in that tingling scene from It’s a Wonderful Life where Stewart is enchanted simply by smelling the perfume of Donna Reed’s hair. On this level, too, lies the hotel restaurant Gracie’s with, like the lobby, an 18-foot ceiling with gold leaf, crystal chandeliers and a sense of elegance. The rooms are spacious; in the conversion the hotel went from 230 rooms to 130. The deLuxe has the same pillow-top mattresses as the Lucia’s and similar knowledgeable doormen who know where to send visitors who want to walk for breakfast or explore a new part of town on foot. The Lucia staff sent us to The Black Rooster Café about three blocks west and the deLuxe valets to Sugar Mama’s Coffee Café about the same distance north from that hotel. Neither café was fancy, just tasty home-made food. If you want a more special place for dinner consider Portland’s Haunted Pizzeria in Old Town on NW Davis. Its bricked-in Shanghai tunnels are part of Portland’s history and it’s quite close to Powell’s famous gargantuan “City of Books” on 10th and Burnside. Or dine at the more elegant, and naturally more pricey, Jake’s Grill at 611 SW 10th where an extra pleasure is looking at murals of the Pacific West’s history including, of course, some of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Nancy Ponzi writes in her family history that she lived “near the beach, near the poets and musicians.” When she met and married an Italian, life was “lots of fun, food and wine…” Dick Ponzi thought it would be a grand idea to revive his family’s tradition of home winemaking.” A nearby winery let them pick grapes for practice! ‘I learned, “ writes Nancy, “ the difference between romance and hard, tedious work.”
“No,” he replied, “I have GPS!”
There was more fun too where we stayed the night in Forest Grove -- at the …shall we say? unusual 
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Eric G. Anderson
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Eric Anderson