Portland Part II

Portland Part II

The second half of the Portland trip was definitely our favorite! After learning our way around the public transportation, Sam said that he had a surprise place that he wanted to take me to. After the meetings in the morning, Sam and I took a fifteen minute train ride to another bus station. Only, we weren’t sure any of those buses took us where we needed, and Sam didn’t want to ruin the surprise by having me help him figure it out. We walked for about twenty minutes before Sam said, “We’re here!” I didn’t see anything for another few steps until all of a sudden we ended up in a parking lot with giant trees. He had brought me to the Grotto—a catholic shrine for our Sorrowful Mother.  

The Grotto was set up so that there were two levels. A bottom level with a several statues, a chapel, a visitor center, and a gift shop, and a top level with shrines, prayer mazes, carvings, a monastery, meditation building, and so much more. To get to the top level, you had to take an elevator 150 feet up the side of a cliff. At the top, there was a building for meditation built right at the edge of the cliff overlooking the city.

 From there, we wandered around enormous trees looking, praying and learning together.

As a side note, Sam saw his first Redwood tree. He was so happy.

There were many shrines built to honor Mary. This one was to honor Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Inside the chapel on the bottom level, we found a mosaic of my patron saint! (Hint: St. Anne)

This little haven of peace was exactly what I needed.

Our second favorite excursion was to the experimental rose garden. I’d been there before, but it was still such a lovely pleasure wandering around and smelling the roses again.

Being the person I am, I eventually gave up taking pictures of the flowers and started taking pictures of the name plates so that I would know what varieties Sam and I wanted to plant in our garden in the future. I LOVE roses. Especially pink, orange, and red ones.

The Japanese garden turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Given at the time we were starving to death and we walked up a million stairs to find the cafe had been shut down for renovation. But there was not as much scenery nor plants as I wanted. Mostly a lot of Japanese maples and native to Oregon greenery. We did see some giant coy fish, which was pretty awesome.

The last place that we visited was Hoyt Arboretum. We went right after the Japanese garden (remember that we still hadn’t eaten lunch…I was pretty grumpy). Before going on a trail I scarfed down two breakfast bars and a handful of peanuts from a bag that Sam bought from the gift shop. The looped trail took us only about an hour to hike, and it was beautiful!!

The brochure said there were over 2000 different plant species planted in the arboretum. It was really fun walking around because almost every plant and tree had a tag on it with the common and scientific name. We saw four different species of Sequoia at least!

Leaving Portland was bittersweet.

We were sad to be going, but happy to be going to see family. We went to King’s Island with my family, picked, broke and canned green beans, and said goodbye to my brother before he ships out. Then we swung by Bowling Green and stayed with Sam’s parents for a couple days.

We had a blast shooting off fireworks at his Uncle Glenn’s house, and had a good laugh after a (previously rain damaged and then scavenged from the dumpster by his uncle) set of fireworks didn’t ignite properly and exploded obnoxiously close at any angle but straight up in the air. (Happy late Fourth of July, by the way!)

We finished the whirlwind of trip by driving back to Georgia in Sam’s 1986 Celica Supra.