Portland, OR

I woke up early this morning to see Kern and Luvo off. They had an 8am flight back to Dublin.

I left the hostel at 9am to start another day of wandering around Portland – no real agenda, just wandering around this cool city.

I met Amy at Powell’s Bookstore at 12pm and we went over to the Hawthorne area to have lunch in a park on the east side of town. The park is on a hill that overlooks Mt Rainier – it’s really weird for me to be in the middle of a city, yet surrounded by snow-capped mountains. We finished lunch at 2pm and drove back downtown.

Amy & I @ Lunch

Amy dropped me off at the Portland Art Museum where I saw the Stroganoff Exhibition. The Stroganoff Family were prolific Russian art collectors around the time of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. This exhibit is 230 pieces of art, which is normally housed in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, or Russian Museum (and originally from the Stroganoff Palace). It was a bit of a flashback to when I was in Russia. Some of the art looked familiar, while definitely the portraits were of people as I remembered seeing them.

Later that night, in the hostel, I met a guy from King Island, Australia, Matt (who now lives in San Francisco), who will be giving me a lift to Seattle in a couple of days. He sells scuba gear and is heading up to Washington for work. We spent the night hanging out at the hostel.