Last Full Day in Portland

Japanese Gardens and Ice Cream were the featured activities of the day.

I want the Japanese Garden all to myself for just an hour every day.

I really don’t think that’s too much to ask.

I want to sit meditation in either the raked gravel garden or on the hidden bench in the moss with the view of a small stream, or in the Tea House.

People in the Japanese Gardens are very reverential. They get it about this place.  Japanese Garden people act very differently from Rose Garden people. Rose Garden people are lovely, too, but they are more distracted and chatty and take lots of pictures. Japanese Garden people are focused. And slow. And silent. They take pictures too, but in a different way.

They move slowly and quietly. They stand and watch.  They are not tourists. Yet they are.

We are both Rose Garden and Japanese Garden people at different times. The baby was a Japanese Garden person in the Japanese Garden and a Rose person in the Rose Garden. After the Japanese Garden we went back to the Rose Garden for lunch where he reached a detente with those evil, spitting Arbor roses,too. Which is good. No sense carrying that grudge around your whole life.

After lunch we went to Salt and Straw which serves quirky ice cream flavors like Tahini and Cardamom, Honey Lavendar, and Cinnamon Snickerdoodle. G got a flight to taste a bit of 5 different ones. I got a float made with Stumptown Coldbrew and  Double Fold Vanilla. My god. That’s all I have to say.

Then it was back home for some cocktails and a Uke lesson from Scott and a strumming lesson from Obie.

We ended the evening with a walk around their neighborhood. This is the view of Mt Hood taken a few streets over.

(All the photos the past few days were taken by G, who did me a total solid by taking and sending me pics throughout the day so I would have someting to post here other than words, which refuse to cooperate after long days of Portland happiness..and Gimlets.)Tomorrow we go into Airport world and fly back.

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