First Outting! (a fail restored)

Every month the Portland Art Museum has free admission from 5-8 pm on the last Friday of the month, or so i thought. It turns out that the free Friday is  the "4th" Friday of the month. March happened to be a rare 5 Friday month. Of course, we did not find this out until our arrival (and post 20 minute parking search). By "we", I mean my bestest Portland buddy, Megan, and her men, boyfriend Chris and housemate Mikey.

Can you name the rider depicted in this statue? If you said, "Jefferson! Lewis or Clark! Grant!" or any similar historical figure, you would sound exactly like we did; 4 bumbling idiots shouting out random names! Turns out it's Theodore Roosevelt....pretty obvious huh:)

Soon we discovered that we had worn our "artsy" outfits for nothing, and we wouldn't be entering the art museum to fill our lives with culture.

So, what's the next best touristy thing on the Westside of town that one can do spare of the moment and for free? Powell Books of course!

Here's the facts: Powell's City of Books is the largest used and new bookstore in the WORLD! Over a million books taking of a whole city block with nine different rooms and 3,500 different sections. One can get lost in this bookstore FAST! They buy over 3,000 used books over the counter EVERY day. About 3,000 people purchase books there each day, while another 3,000 (like myself) just browse and drink coffee.

We managed to find some art books, adding some extra culture to the excursion.

I found the Vegan cookbooks! WAY too many to choose from, and ultimately being overwhelmed won out and I was unable to choose a book to take home with me.

I'm not especially fond of all the one way streets and difficulties of finding parking on the west side of Portland, but the great thing about Powell's is that they have a good sized parking garage where you can get free validated parking! Although we were disappointed that we didn't get to go to the art museum, we enjoyed spending a couple of hours getting lost in Powell's