Me and Sandhya love traveling and would love to take time off from Austin few times a year. So, when the time came to decide on where do we want to go for this year’s vacation, the choice wasn’t easy to make. Considering Sandhya’s present condition hiking was ruled out and hence most of our favorites were crossed from the list. No California and no Utah left us with east coast or north west coast. We picked the north west when my brother announced that he will be moving to Portland for his new job.
When we landed in Portland, it was a near perfect 70F temperature and the greenery of the place completely impressed me. There were a ton of rose plants planted along the side walks. While in Portland we visited a few places in the city, took a road trip to Crater lake and Redwood national park. Also, did a road trip to Mt St Helens. In this part I will cover the places in Portland.
Rose Garden: My brother who is currently a resident of Portland and had visited the places before mentioned that Portland Rose garden and Japanese gardens were worth a visit. He also cautioned us that it is off season for roses. We wanted to start the trip slow and easy, we drove to the rose garden. First thing that amazed me was there were a ton of roses for the off peak season and the park visit was free. They had multi colored roses, some specially bred and dedicated to great personalities. they had roses with single layer of petals to roses with multiple layers of petals. I was amazed with both the quality and quantity of roses in the garden. Some of the roses were in bunches while some were individual, some roses were shrubs while some were individual plants.
They truly had some unique colored roses. Considering it was a weekday and afternoon there were considerable number of tourists in the place. I had to control my shutter finger and see the roses through the naked eyes rather than through the camera lens. The fragrance in the garden is worth mentioning and sad there is no technology to capture the same. It was very colorful and picturesque. I wish I had taken an over all picture of the rose garden to share. Since the garden is on a hill top it also offers a beautiful view of the down town In the end, I recommend rose garden and it is worth the time.
Japanese Garden : Just above the hill top from the rose garden is the famous Portland Japanese garden. There is a small road that we could walk up or there is a free ride shuttle ride to take us up to the park. I have to mention the effort the shuttle driver made to accommodate a handicap women and her scooter into the shuttle, made me think this guy should run for the senate or even better governor. Unlike the rose garden visiting Japanese garden costs money ($10 entry fee). It is a nice place but we weren’t completely blown away by the garden, may be our lack of understanding for Japanese culture or our eyes were colored by such beautiful roses. The garden had some unique and nice things and supposedly one of the Japanese ambassadors to US had told that this place is the most authentic Japanese garden outside Japan.
They had a few unique things and it was real clean and well maintained. I think we spent less time at the Japanese garden than we spent at the rose garden. After the Japanese garden we thought we would head towards Powell book house but on the way we stopped for coffee and shopped at a locally owned grocery store, which my brother said there were a lot of them in Portland. Finally instead of Powell book house we headed home.
Day 2 of the trip we headed towards Columbia river gorge.
No comments:
Post a Comment