Portland=Fairlyland?

Andy and I had an adventure recently to a strange, mythical place.  I do not know at which point our plane crossed into a new dimension, but it did seem rather appropriate in retrospect to be flying Spirit airlines.  

I mentioned to Andy a couple of times that now I understood why "Oregon" is usually accompanied by pine trees.  Very soon, we started compiling pieces of evidence for why we thought maybe we were in a fairyland instead of a real place.  

Look!  Hills with pine trees behind us!

Actual topography!

We were walking around a neighborhood and saw recycling on the corner and a bin out for a compost service.  

There was a store dedicated to socks and clearly doing well.

There was a farm to table restaurant in the airport that even cured their own bacon in house.

Downtown had so many mature trees, where parts felt more like a forest than they did a city. 

Apparently, Portland is in a Temperate Rain Forest Biome.  This fact was related to us casually, but what this means is basically everything can grow here.  No, really.  Just walking around in a neighborhood, we saw succulent desert plants, then a palm tree, a Japanese Maple, a White Oak, and this huge pine (below) within a few blocks of each other.

This was just a random tree in someone's yard.

There were bike paths even on the major highways.  One particular sir had EPIC leg muscles and clearly biked everywhere.  

In addition to hills, we also saw a view of a snow-capped mountain driving along.  This is still a highly unusual sight for me, considering that I've only otherwise seen mountains once in my life (spring break trip to Colorado).  

When we went to fill up the rental car, there was a gas station attendant who met us there and filled up the car himself for us.  Evidently, Oregon is one of two states left that does this.  

Walking around, there was a lot of diversity in people--not just different racial backgrounds, but ages, too.  

We were told upon arrival that one of the main things we should see, one of the places that people would ask if we visited while we were in Portland, was Powell's Bookstore.  It was huge.  It was glorious.  And it was hella busy.  As Andy put it, it was throwing elbows trying to get around kind of busy.  AND they had a shelf (only a shelf, but a whole shelf) of books in Norwegian.  

The area, too, seems to reflect a lot of progressive ideals that are important to the both of us.  
One of the real kickers for me, too, came from a discussion with friends, that teachers in the area are similar to doctors, in the capacity that they are treated as professionals, as compared to the attitude that if a student is doing poorly then clearly it is the teacher's fault.  I know, crazy, right?  

So Andy and I still are not completely sure whether Portland is real or just a figment of our imaginations, but to be fair, we only had about 36 hours there.  Truly, this added to the whole surrealism of the experience, that we barreled in and barreled out in the course of a weekend.  Why take the time to go and come back, without a ton of time to explore?  We are still storing our time off for our Norway trip in February.  But we weren't going to miss it.  

Because of these two beautiful people here (the beautiful ones in the middle, I mean).

So glad that we could make it out for Nolan and Laura's wedding that weekend.  We got to catch up with some friends, the ceremony and venue were lovely, the bride was glamorous, and the groom was pleased as anything.  We would have done it again in a heartbeat.  

Had a fantastic time.  Getting home was a bit of a struggle, but that's because Fairyland wanted to keep us there longer.  We got back home at 2 am Monday morning and still went to work.  Would still do it again.  

This is our "Holy crap, we made it back alive" face.