PDXphiles For lovers of the Rose City, Portland Oregon

Inspired by the inventories Liz posts on Flickr, Karen and I decided to take a photo of everything we accumulated on our trip to Portland and then Seattle. We set physical we took from America on the floor and then stood on a chair to take the photo with our DSLR. Below is the photo plus a list of the items with some links, taken from the annotations Karen and I added to the Flickr photo.

• Overland Equipment Auburn bag.
• The Alexander Technique Manual by Richard Brennan
• Two maps of Powell's City of Books in Portland.
• Boost Your Brain Power Week by Week: 52 Techniques to Make You Smarter by Bill Lucas
• U.S. stamps for mailing postcards.
• Various TriMet maps, passes and info. From right to left: three maps, a comic in Spanish, and a bike rider's guide. The five passes are: one bus transfer, two weekly passes, and two "honored citizens" passes that I rescued from the trash.
• Seattle Sound Transit guide.
• Two free Portland bridges bookmarks. That beat paying $19 for the poster of the same bridges.
• Inclusive City book flyer.
• 4 Amtrak ticket stubs for the train trips we took from Portland to Seattle, then from Seattle to Vancouver.
• Artist postcard from gallery in the Pearl District.
• Pumpkin Butter with Port, from the "Made in Oregon" store.
• Spiced hazelnuts with cinnamon and pepper. I talked to the man who makes them at the People's Co-op Farmer's Market. It was chilly. (The weather at the market, not the man!)
• Dreaming Escape, a book of poems translated from Albanian.
• Greeting cards from Positively Green
• Seattle Art Museum tickets to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. We stumbled on it on our way to a concert, donated in the wrong box, plead our case, and got in as the result of the donation.
• Our little big purchase: the Flip MinoHD, with a custom design that I commissioned from @idleglory (flickr: rocketcandy).
• 2 rolls of film from the Fisheye camera, ISO 400 and ISO 200.
• Notebooks and a Jane Austen address book, also from Powell's.
• Apple Cider, obtained from the Farmer's Market.
• Bridges of Portland fridge magnet.
• Art gallery opening card from Moshi Moshi.
• The poster for Duncan Sheik's 2009 winter tour for Whisper House and Spring Awakening. We attended his shows in Portland and Seattle.
• Ticket stub from the Portland Duncan Sheik show.
• Artist postcard from gallery in the Pearl District.
• Skirt purchased from The Future Inc., which closed this past Saturday.
• An "Oregon Wilderness" postcard, the outlier of the 8 we sent in total to our American and Canadian friends on this trip.
• Apple Cinnamon Tea from Pike Place Public Market in Seattle. The entire kitchen smells like this tea now.

On my trip to Portland last week, while my girlfriend went to the People's Farmer's Market, I took a jaunt over to the airport from downtown. To travel from the airport from downtown, I had to get a zone upgrade, because the 7-day pass we bought (see below) afforded us 2 zones. (We mostly traveled from Zone 2 through Zone 1 to the Fareless Square.) The fine folks at the TriMet information office at Pioneer Courthouse Square advised me that to get the zone upgrade, I would have to step on a bus, get an upgrade, and immediately disembark and hop on the train. I wasn't interested in risking getting caught by a fare inspector, so I made the trip to Gateway/Northeast 99th Avenue TC, hopped off the train, and got a zone upgrade from the #19 bus driver there.

On the trip I took quite a bit of HD video using the Flip Mino HD camera we bought. Following is a Hillsboro-bound MAX train arriving at Gateway/Northeast 99th Avenue Transit Center (which I will refer to in conversation as "Gateway" after the SkyTrain station here in Greater Vancouver).

Having a 7-day pass may not have been worth it from a purely financial perspective: as mentioned, we spent 5 days there in total and the pass did not apply to the Aerial Tram up to OHSU. (We would have appreciated a ticket stub as a memento of that trip. I sent a note to TriMet directly with that suggestion.) We did very much appreciate the convenience of the two-zone fare and not only the convenience of not having to fish for change, but being able to select which consecutive 7 days we could use the pass. In Toronto, you can't select which days. At least they have one, though: we'd love to be able to have weekly passes in Vancouver!

We've bought the tickets, so it's official: Karen and I will be going to Portland for the last week of February, then take a very short side-trip to Seattle on the way back. We're taking the Greyhound bus down from Vancouver, B.C., so we'll get a lot of Interstate 5 goodness. Since we didn't know exactly how we were getting back from Seattle, we decided that at least on the way from PDX to Seatown that we'd take the Amtrak train. A little more expensive, and the Amtrak guy in Vancouver wanted to see our passports. We managed to convince the ticket agent that we didn't know we needed them to buy tickets and that we had just made the decision (both true), so we'll finally be able to do as Djun did in 2005.

We very tentatively decided to neither of us bring our laptops, the idea being that we'll find enough computing power with friends and cafes to check our email as much as we need to and that's it. I'll bring my iPhone, which I'm assured by the fine folks at Fido will cost me an arm and a leg to use the data plan while roaming in the United States. As part of our trip budget, I have an amount of total usage in mind. Again, friends and wifi in the wilds of PDX will get us jacked in when we need to.

To update my thoughts on the PDX Bus iPhone application, the developer today had approved a 2.0 release of the app, which embeds Google Maps inside the application. It also adds a flashing screen to make it easier for TriMet bus drivers to see you. I didn't believe that TriMet actually recommending this, but the transportation agency itself has an explanatory video, including asking for what are called in Vancouver "request stops", i.e. getting dropped off anywhere along the route, not just at designated stops.

Check out Dalas Verdugo's offbeat guide to New York City, which features PGE Park, an underground MAX train, the Lloyd Center Ice Rink, and ... hold on a second. That's Portland, Oregon! Deception!

Thanks to Tylor for pointing it out Dalas' hilarious video!

I've been following the Portland Apple Store saga starting with an article at Portland Architecture (which I submitted to Daring Fireball) and after a subsequent Portland Architecture article I see that John Gruber linked to Cabel Sasser's plea to Apple, the Landmarks Commission, and site developers to renew the project. Cabel, who lives on NW 21st and whose software company, Panic (which develops for the Mac), has an office on NW 10th, would have loved to have an Apple store in his neighbourhood. I'd love to know where he got the proposed design from, though it's possible I missed it from reading his article on the subject.