Stump Town

We finally made it into Portland!  

I used to live here years ago and just love the area.  I worked for Delta Airlines as a Ticket Agent at PDX and got yelled at in Korean from passengers on the 5 a.m. arrival flight almost daily.  

I also attended floral design school here!  I was single and living with my mom and dad, it was right before my dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  

We lived across the river in Vancouver, Washington so our first stop was taking the kids to see my old house.

 It looks so bad now, the front tree is so overgrown and they have let the landscaping go.  It was such a cute house with a great floorplan!

We quickly headed over to Fort Vancouver to tour the Marshall House.

Nobel Peace prize winner George C. Marshall lived here for a short time!

 A nice elderly man gave us a great tour of the place and even let Dan and the kids try on Mr. Marshall's hat.  

We all have big heads I guess, it didn't fit any of us!

 We crossed the river and my kids were ooohing and aaaahing over all the cool bridges Portland has.  

I'll admit it's a beautiful site and the sun was peeking out to welcome us to this great city!

 We headed up to the Pittock Mansion, one of my favorite places in Portland.

 Such a grand house!  

I love how well the city has taken care of the estate.

 This is the library with the carved wood ceiling, I could see myself curled up with a good book here on a cold and dreary gray Portland day.

 The music room is huge and so beautiful!

 Lauren with piano that belonged to one of the Pittock girls.  

Pretty fancy.

 Exquisite ceiling in the Turkish smoking room. 

 

 Outside view of the front (side?) door of the mansion.

 Back side of the mansion...that large picture window is the music room. 
The grounds of the mansion are just gorgeous!  Oregon is so lush and green, the plants they had there were so beautiful and made me want to hurry home to start improving my own little yard!

 I have to start sneaking pictures of Graham now, he is not a fan of the camera.  Look at the view behind him though!  Handsome boy AND a great view!

 We stopped for lunch at Little Big Burger and this is where things took an ugly turn...we started eating our way through the city.  Burgers and fries here.  Delish!

 Then we happened across an ice cream shop.  It had a short line so we thought it must be good.  

Come to find out the Food Network has named the Salt and Straw the number two ice cream in America.  

I was perfectly content and delighted with second place in this case.

 It is decorated so cool and the ice cream is really....just amazing!

 We headed over to get lost in Powell's Books for a long while.  Each kid picked out a book to read in the car the rest of the trip and I reminisced about how lovely book stores smell.  I love my Kindle Paperwhite, but man there is something magical about those tall shelves full of books and the smell of paper.