Portland Archives - Trends SettersTrends Setters

Hey! I’m back home in Montreal, but vacation Is not finish, I still have until next Tuesday to relax! Here’s the second part of my West Coast Road Trip recap, this time it’s about Portland. We both really enjoyed our time in Portland, it’s a young, fun and colourful city. The public transportation is easy and cheap and there are tons of good restaurants and coffee. What I also enjoy is that music, art and book seem really important for them, and it’s a point that is important for me too.

First let’s start with day one, for our first day, we explored downtown. Of course, I did some shopping ;) since we don’t have a J. Crew here in Montreal I took advantage of the situation you know!! The places you have to visit downtown are; first go grab a good coffee at Stumptown coffee at the Ace Hotel. From there you will be after a two minutes walk at one of the biggest bookstore I ever saw, Powell’s. You might get lost there for a while so you will need a little snack after that and nothing better than Voodoo Doughnut in Portland ;) This place is so cool I was literally like a kid in front of the hundreds of different flavors they have!! Pearl district is the neighbourhood to go for good shopping, after you explored the neighbourhood I recommend Boxer Ramen right in front of the Ace Hotel. The painted walls of this restaurant are just too adorable! We finished our first day downtown at the Portland Fashion Week, without invitation haha! That was so cool, we were practically front row, I wasn’t that impressed by the collections, but still it was a really cool and unplanned experience!

For our second day, we explored Division district, which is on the other side of the river that splits downtown, but first we started our day with a good breakfast at Sweedeedee, it’s a Hipster coffee where they served only organic food and mostly from local market, I really enjoyed it! I really wanted to go to Division to try the famous restaurant Pok-Pok, but we also went to see another famous place for Karim pleasure, Burnside Skatepark, which was built by skateboarders themselves under the Burnside bridge!

We also tried the famous ice-cream place Salt & Straw, after that, we needed to take a walk haha! it was really good, but extremely rich! We went for a small hike at Mount Tabor Park, it’s really beautiful there and it’s a perfect place to take a nap under the sun! We finished our day at Pok-Pok and it was better than what I expected, you really have to go there one time!

On our last day in Portland, we went for a hiking trip to Columbia River Gorge, then we ended our day downtown, we made a quick stop at the Adidas headquarters so we could take pictures of us with the giant Superstar outside the building ;)

This hiking day, was one of the highlights on this trip, it was so beautiful there and it’s only a 40 minutes drive from downtown Portland. The forest is just too beautiful and the Columbia river surrounded by mountains is breathtaking.