One Day in Portland

Although it's completely out of character for me, I did so little planning for our short visit to Portland that all I had on my itinerary was: delicious food, craft breweries and murals. With this very basic brief, Patrick took over the mapping out of most of our time in Portland: it turns out wherever there's a brewery, there's also a great mural or two as well as, most likely, a foodie hotspot, so we broke our day into three or four main areas and used Uber to get between each one.  While an Uber between areas would take maybe ten minutes, buses were going to take 40 minutes to an hour, so it was a case of time being more valuable than the few dollars we'd save on the bus!

The Alberta neighbourhood

We started in the Alberta neighbourhood because this was where our AirBnB was based.  It turned out to be our absolute favourite area of Portland: it had a quiet, very local feel which we loved, and some of the best murals, food and drinks we tried all day!

We started off the day with brunch at Pine State Biscuits.  This place, which serves a mean chicken, biscuits and gravy, was obviously popular with locals but we didn't have any trouble getting our order in quickly as the tourists who flock to famous eats in the city such as Voodoo Donuts were unexpectedly missing here. 

After brunch, we walked along Alberta Street, making sure to look left and right down each side street: pretty much every one had been converted to art with some of the most beautiful murals I've ever seen.  Right outside Pine State Biscuits you can find the 'To Oregon With Love' mural by Blaine Fontana.

Meanwhile, down the street to the right you can find many more, including my favourite floral piece on the wall of the Clary Sage Herbarium painted by Rather Severe.

We doubled back to the brewery right next door to Pine State Biscuits: Great Notion Brewing.  This turned out to be our favourite brewery in the city, and we visited a lot of them in our short time there!  Great Notion Brewing offered the most creative beers, including a tasty Lemon Gelati beer and our absolute favourite drink of the trip, the Blueberry Muffin that is essentially the exact liquid form of everybody's favourite muffin. 

To round off a visit to Alberta, we headed to Salt and Straw, for probably the best ice cream we've ever had. We first encountered this creamery in Seattle and loved it so much that we had to try even more flavours - we tried the carrot cake and almond brittle, which were both delicious!

The Pioneer district

The Pioneer district is Portland's historical district and you can see the tenement-style buildings that are so distinctive in American cities such as NYC and Seattle.  But most people come here for the donuts: specifically, Blue Star Donuts.  Blue Star Donuts are the donut of choice for those who don't want to wait in line at Voodoo Donuts, and when we arrived at about 5pm it was pretty dead.  We picked out four promising-sounding donuts including maple-bacon and raspberry-rosemary, and took them to go.  We grabbed an Uber and headed to the 1920s Pittock Mansion high on a hill to eat them as we watched the sun set over the city.  The donuts themselves were fine, but after discovering Crosstown Donuts in London (UK),  not many donuts can live up to their mind blowing standards!

One thing we really enjoyed in the Pioneer district was Glowing Greens - a pirate themed, blacklit, glow-in-the-dark mini golf course!  We had a lot of fun here, and the quality of the 3D style art made the theme come to life!

A really nice brewery we visited around here was 10Barrels.  They have a rooftop terrace as well as an air-conditioned bar and restaurant, and plenty of tasty specialty beers.

We finished up our time in this area by visiting Deschutes Brewery.  Like most of the craft breweries in Portland, you can order a sampler flight of six small beers, which we drank alongside some pretty decent mac'n'cheese.  Deschutes is a big beer hall, so if you're looking for a more intimate experience, this is not it. 

Other murals we checked out:

-The Arrows mural on SE Hawthorne Blvd

-The famous 'Keep Portland Weird' sign on W Burnside Street

-The Rhino mural on SE Morrison Street. Sadly this one had been graffitied over (behind Patrick's strategically-placed head!)

Other breweries we checked out:

-Ecliptic Brewing has a space theme: we enjoyed the fact that all the beers on offer were named after entities in space, although the beers themselves weren't as adventurous as some of the other places we tried.

-Cascade Brewing was a surprise hit: it specialised in sour beers, which I'm not typically a fan of.  However, I tried a sampler flight of three sour ales and loved them all!  The names were wonderfully punny as well - my favourite was the "Bourbonic Plague"!

Bonus activity: food cart pods! We had ambitious aims to visit as many of the city's famous food cart pods as we could, but in the end we only made it to Cartlandia, where we had tasty Vietnamese food and boba tea. We'd definitely visit more pods if we ever came back to Portland!

So that's how we spent 24 hours in Portland. We could have stayed longer, although it's probably for the best that we didn't...the options for food and craft beer are truly endless!