Pacific Northwest Trip 2008 Day 10 Wednesday July 28, 2008 Portland OR, Vancouver WA

UPDATED: January 9, 2021

This is the tenth of a series of posts recalling my third annual trip to Seattle, though at this stage of the trip I was in Portland, not Seattle. I’ve made minor corrections to these reports. Also, I’ve added additional thoughts with the hindsight of five years later or to add further clarification; I use “NOW” to denote such cases.

The basement made the hostel seem darker than it really was so didn't get up until after 8.  Probably needed to catch up on rest anyway.  I visited the locker area and noticed a nearby yellow pages and wrote a few places down; haven't managed to visit any of them yet; hopefully by tomorrow.

I bought a daypass and went downtown.  The driver said the pass was good on the bus to Vancouver.  it wasn't so I bought another pass to get there.  And so I visited Vancouver for the first time today.  Well, Vancouver WA anyway.  Portland actually looks a lot less dull in nicer weather, though it'll probably never be a fav of mind. 

 

[NOW: The Portland transit system is TriMet while the Vancouver system is C-TRAN. You can get to Vancouver and travel around Vancouver on TriMet passes, but you have to pay extra for the express bus to Vancouver]

Back to Vancouver: I checked out Fort Vancouver, then went to Vancouver's main mall and bought some DVDs.  I hadn't had breakfast so I had brunch at a pizza buffet near the mall.  Then I worked my way back downtown.  I actually spent more time in Vancouver than I really wanted to, but the dessert pizza was great and it was interesting to see an historic fort. 

 

[I may have bought the DVDs at fye at Vancouver Mall; I think the mall had a different name back then.]

I took a MAX light rail train to the Oregon Zoo and spent 2 1/2 hours there.  A beaver put on a bit of a show, as did the lorikeets.  My camera couldn't pick up the bats in Seattle but it managed to pick up the ones here.  You save a bus by taking transit to the park but the trade-up is that a small pop bottle is $3.  There was a dinosaur exhibit and and a concert, both at extra charge, but I was content to just see the animals.

So not a wide range of things today because my two big excursions ate up a lot of time, but I've been having a better day thus far.  And Portland does look prettier in the sun than in the clouds.  Which is good because I actually got depressed walking around Portland yesterday, even before the computer incident.

This computer at Powell's Technical is giving me problems too so the Internet's being restarted.  Thank goodness for Notepad.  Pasting there and pasting back seems to work.  Luckily this time when it crashed it didn't actually shut down so I was able to move this text to Notepad in time.

[NOW: Powell's Technical has now closed, though other branches exist. Written the next day:]

After I signed off visited Powell's proper, bought a book on comics and a book by John Waters on bad taste, ate at McDonald's again at Pioneer Mall, then returned to hostel.

[NOW: The John Waters book was one of the things that got stolen, as I’ll get to soon. Still haven’t replaced it.] 

My room is co-ed but there was nothing sexy about last night.  As I was dozing off an Asian woman complained that I was making too much noise on the bed (I tend to move about a fair bit when I sleep and was on an older upper bunk).  So I switched bed sides so my head would be resting against a wall and fell back asleep... and got woken up by the same woman complaining about the noise I was making while I was sleeping.  I groggily tried to explain there's not much I can do if I'm asleep but I think I fell on deaf ears.

I dragged myself out of bed, put pants on over my pj's and left a note at the vacant front desk in case she complained about me in the morning).  On the plus side it was the only time I saw Bailey, the hostel's cat but he didn't seem to want to be petted.  I think I saw the woman one more time but this time she changed her mind.

[NOW: So the note was basically to explain that any incident that the woman was upset about happened while I was asleep, thus nothing I could really do much about.]