one thing i’ve been trying to do while on the west coast is to go to as many places as i can. when i’m back home in toronto, it’s not really worth it to travel out to the west coast because you lose a whole day flying and then there’s the jet lag associated with flying through time zones; so i probably won’t have any chance to explore the west coast for a long time (unless i somehow decide to work out here).

anyways, this weekend we decided to go down to portland which is on the oregon-washington border. it’s a little farther away than vancouver is, but we did pass through vancouver (washington that is) on the way there. portland if you didn’t know is one of the best places to live in america; not too sure of the reason but i’m guessing the lack of a state sales tax is one of the reasons!

so we started the three hour drive early in the morning and arrived in portland by lunch time. we headed over to the portland saturday market in the historic district and grabbed some lunch. the saturday market is basically your normal city street market, like st lawrence market in toronto or pike place market in seattle. they had a lot of ethnic food, street performers as well as arts and crafts. after that, we promptly left the city and went shopping 😉

what is there really in oregon? all i know about it is that it’s the destination in oregon trail. the main draw apparently is in fact the outlet shopping and as such we headed over to the largest outlet mall in oregon and shopped like cheap (some may prefer frugal) chinese people.

as you can probably tell, there isn’t a lot to blog about on this trip seeing as how we didn’t really go to portland. we had originally planned to return to downtown portland for dinner, but we got side tracked once we found fry’s (remember, it’s geek heaven). saving sales tax on clothes is one thing, but when you’re making $1000+ purchases, 8.8% is a big deal! fortunately for me, i didn’t buy anything although i was considering getting a car kit for my ipod.

our plans got even further side tracked when we decided to have some conveyor belt style sushi in the same town as fry’s. it was cool though, because i had wanted to try it for a long time. anyways, it’s not the best place to go for a guy since you have to pay for each dish 😉 anyways, that was it for the weekend. only a couple more weekends left so i have to make the most of it.

on a side note, i came home to find out that my roommate’s (rental) car burned to the ground in southern oregon on their way to salt lake city! i won’t go into details, but they lost all their electronics, cds, etc which is like a catastrophe for geeky people. so now i’m paranoid about going on any more road trips.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: travelling