Monday September 15th, 2025 - Fall trip to oregon - Days 2 - 4, travel to Portland and then to Eugene - many miles of urban walks
Our flights to PDX went well. While maybe a little underwhelming, having a dinner on our first class leg from Detroit to Portland was a novel experience. The Portland airport, which I used to work at, has gone through some very widely Instagram covered renovations. I wasn't surprised by seeing the light colored wood and curving walls of the new terminal but I was surprised at how cavernous and cathedral like the height of the ceilings are now. It's very fresh and modern looking and feels like they worked to downplay the walls that have increasingly made airports feel very segmented with a check-in area then a huge security screening area and then the secure area with concourses etc. That's all still present at PDX now but it's been blended into a more natural flow with less jarring transitions. It was also interesting to see how they blended the new areas and the old. As PDX has done for decades, the carpets and colors don't jarringly change and while the fancy new wood and high ceiling go away, it feels like it was intentional and not clumsy. I was surprised they moved the rental car center. It used to be almost straight across the terminal roadway and reachable by either crossing the road at a crosswalk or via suspended walkways that were accessible via elevator and escalator from the main floors of the terminal. Now it's a substantially longer walk but through a tunnel with moving walkways to an area of the airport property that was previously not used by the public.
Picking up our rental car was super fast and we made it to friends' house where we were staying in their short term rental apartment in the backyard. We caught up with them briefly before heading to bed. The next morning we took the bus to some of Brian's friends apartment and wandered the South Park blocks area some other areas near PSU for a while before eating at a new food hall. I had a crab bisque which was warm, flavorful and pretty indulgent for a lunch.
Sunday started off with a trip to our very favorite Portland area bagel shop which is actually in Vancouver. My friend Jim, who lives nearby, joined us for breakfast. It started raining in the wee hours of the morning on Sunday and was supposed to be a fairly light rain that would end by 9 am. It ended up being a substantial drenching that went longer than expected. It wasn't clear if it would let up enough to make any outdoor activity pleasant but a very leisurely chat over our bagels and it did eventually stop raining and when it stopped it was completely done for the day. We followed Jim back to his house to see where he lives now and meet his super sassy personality filled cat. I think Jim is a very peaceful person and he chooses and accentuates that peaceful feeling in his apartment which faces a garden courtyard and is far enough off of the major streets of Vancouver to be nearly silent. Next we went downtown to explore Vancouver's very ambitious downtown/waterfront expansions. There are literally more new buildings in that part of downtown than there were buildings in total 10 years ago. We also walked over the 'land bridge' that connects downtown to Fort Vancouver, a National Park historic site. The bridge itself is interesting since it has trees and other plants growing on it but mostly it's there to make Fort Vancouver not feel isolated since it's surrounded by Vancouver's own little airport and state route 14, a noisy freeway. It's interesting to see Vancouver reaching to have so many dining, entertainment and modern waterfront apartments and condos. They've already made a destination worthy downtown complete with a beautiful hotel (Hotel Indigo) and miles of connected Columbia River facing trails and there is just so much more to come.
Dinner was at a BBQ place in Tigard Oregon that we used to visit after long hikes with our friend's Bob & Frank. Bob was out of town but Frank came to have dinner with us and there were lots of funny stories from our friends as we remembered them. We went to bed early Sunday night.
Since Brian and I left Portland very intentionally after finding a lot to not love about the way it is ran and how it had changed over the years, it was impossible not to try and compare our brief 2025 glimpse of it with our past experiences. Overall, I must agree with what all our friends locally said which is that it's on the rebound. During our walk around downtown (on a Saturday with good weather and not just in an extra-groomed area) we weren't approached for money or particularly close to anybody in the middle of a mental health breakdown. There was a lively sense of foot traffic around but it wasn't crowded except for at the farmer's market.
Still, we did walk through a few areas that smelled very distinctly of urine. I believe I saw a man injecting drugs into his inner arm. There were too many homeless people to count although only a few tents or shopping carts which seemed so numerous before. We also saw a poorly controlled pit bull nearly attack somebody and later, from the car near my old area of Old Town, the full spectacle of somebody literally lying in a gutter, a man who couldn't keep his pants from falling off his ass etc etc.
I'm also horrified that people in Oregon are paying anywhere from 3.89 (seen at one no-name station in Albany) to over 5 dollars a gallon for regular gas. The most common suburban prices we saw were about 4.39. This is over a dollar more than at home and, from what I hear, has been the price of gas for the last few YEARS more or less. Until a few weeks ago our cheapest stations (BJ's wholesale or Wal-Mart) were around 2.99. My Crab Bisque lunch (with no waiter service and a self-ordering kiosk) cost 34 dollars. Our rental car is just over 600 dollars for 1 week, about 175 of which is various government fees. There are now speed cameras scattered around town. The speed limit on long stretches of main roads such as 82nd Street is now 30 MPH which is painfully slow. And though optimistically talked about, not one shovel of dirt has yet been turned over towards replacing the ancient and sub-standard I-5 bridges. I truly can't imagine that very many high income people will stay in Portland (if not Oregon in general) when safer, shinier, income tax free Washington is so close. If they can't make Portland less expensive (and they probably can't) then it needs to be 'better' than the suburbs that surround it. I think it's notable that of the 10 friends we saw this weekend, only one couple lives in downtown. 1 lives (unhappily) in North East Portland. The rest live in Vancouver, Beaverton, Tigard, or a very plush suburban part of Portland that nearly borders Tigard. I know my rants about Portland are probably tiresome but they are heartfelt and I don't mean to be damning with faint praise. Portland DOES genuinely look better than it did and it was mostly a joy walking around downtown and having Trimet there to get us around without having to drive everywhere, 2 hallmarks of why I moved to Portland.
Monday we drove to Eugene. I-5 was as annoying as ever with constant congestion and poor driving from about Wilsonville to just north of Albany. The actual speed of our journey wasn't bad but any attempt to go more than the mob selected speed that all 3 lanes randomly scattered traffic drove at required lots of passing on the right and maneuvering around the whole roadway. Honestly, the traffic on this seemingly normal Monday morning was similar to what the NY Thruway near us experiences on just a few holiday weekends each year. I exited, as I almost always do, at Albany where OR-99 provides a peaceful farm lined alternative to battling it out with cars and trucks on I-5 or succumbing to mindlessly driving 63 MPH in the left lane for an hour as is the style there.
Seeing my Dad has been very fun so far. We didn't do anything very profound but we've just enjoyed our meals and running some errands with him etc. There is a bit of a fog hanging over everything with my step-mother's declining health but for now she is in Missouri with family and I think my dad appreciates the visitors.
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