Cacao! I have more to say about our time in Portland...

Sorry about all the Portlandia references - they will stop after this post.  Anyway, about our last day in Portland.  Paige and Jules roused us from bed bright and early and we left our hotel right after breakfast to visit the International Rose Test Garden in Washington Park.  The roses, the garden, and the setting were absolutely beautiful.  I found the gardens very inspiring even though most of the plantings except the roses do not grow very well in Southern California.  All those evergreens and hostas combined with the lawns veiled the entire garden in green.  Southern California is a coastal desert and never shimmers with greenery, but I love it just the same of course.  The rose garden was a good example of how important background planting is to showcase flowers.

 
After our walk through the rose gardens, Paige and Brandon hit the playground for almost an hour.  We had thought about going to the Japanese Garden but it was starting to rain and we wanted to ensure we had lunch and got on the road to my aunt's house by that afternoon.  Brandon had read that one of the food truck pods had really good poutine, so we decided to head across the river and have some fries with cheese and gravy.

Well, the poutine turned out to be underwhelming although the pesto-mayonnaise dip was delicious.  It was not the easygoing gastrotruck experience that we'd been expecting.  For one thing, Brandon was convinced that the operator of the poutine truck had been watching pornography just before opening the truck for business.  So, that was gross.  And Paige was near a tantrum and Jules was fussy.  Paige's frustration was instigated by a little coin operated merry-go-round that did not work.  She became annoyingly obsessed with its little green dirty horses.

Seeing another truck with some promising looking milkshakes, I decided to order one to salve the bad experience.  I swear, it took the girl behind the counter 15 minutes to scoop and blend my lavender-honey milkshake.   I know she was busy telling her co-worker all about her weekend and explaining her personality traits and quirks in great detail, but I honestly couldn't figure out what was slowing her down.  There were no other customers.  The shake turned out to be absolutely delicious, almost ethereal, though, and I would order another, but the slowness didn't help my annoyance at the time.  Brandon's fresh mint and Oreo shake was also very nice.

So, with that, we said cacao to Portland, loaded into Brandon's truck to the sound of children whining, and headed for Buena Vista.  Luckily, whining quickly turned into snoring.  Stay tuned for more...

Peaches!

Almost-ripe peaches from my backyard tree. I pruned and fertilized according to R. Sanford Martin and Ken Andersen's "How to Prune Fruit Trees and Roses" and Pat Welsh's "Southern California Organic Gardening." The tree has some peach leaf curl, which is a disease, so this winter I will treat the tree with Bordeaux mixture. My aunt gave me some while I was visiting her in Oregon, so I'm ready!

Put a Bird on It! Part 1.

We are just back from a road trip that kicked off with Brandon greeting us girls at Portland International Airport with hugs and a large pink box of Voodoo doughnuts. Paige tried a few bites but wasn't that interested. Brandon and I gobbled down our apple fritter and blueberry cake doughnuts though. It was funny to see those pink boxes throughout the day in the hands of other tourists as we wandered around Portland.

We dropped our luggage off at the Hotel Vintage Plaza, wrangled the double stroller into position and set off on foot to Stumptown Coffee. Stumptown was good, but I think I like Blue Bottle Coffee better, in case anyone cares about that sort of thing. Coffees in hand and one diaper change later, we wandered into what turned out to be the Portland Saturday Market at North Waterfront Park along the Willamette River.

Fueled by Greek food, rose-petal Rogue beer (in honor of the Rose Festival), and milk, Brandon and Paige danced to the live music for almost 30 minutes. Yes, it was very cute.

And then we ambled along Waterfront Park, which had a carnival.

Mostly the sky looked like this:

In fact, the weather was rainy and cold until we reached Northern California. But we soldiered on. Paige never once complained about being cold and I think is very warm blooded.

Once we got our fill of gawking at crafts, carnival rides, the river, and the milieu of oddly tattooed/pierced people, we walked back to the plazas closer to our hotel, starting with Pioneer Square. The Festival of Flowers was being commemorated by a flower pot installation of medallion patterns on the square.

And then we went to Directors Park, which was hands down Paige's favorite. She didn't stop playing in the fountain even after it started raining. The fountain was really cool - I wish we had something like this in San Diego. I know that children wade at the fountain in Balboa Park, but this fountain was specifically designed for little ones to play in.

We ended the day on a high note - a long nap and the Starlight Parade! We lucked out because it turns out that our hotel was on the parade route and had set out chairs for the event. The parade started very late, almost at 9:00, so we only lasted until about 10:00 with our little ones. But we saw some awesome marching bands and floats. Paige got all sorts of swag and smiles from the people in the parade. I just realized that I have mostly been talking about Paige, but all day people said "ah, what a cute, bright-eyed girl!" to Jules. She was content to nap and look around from her stroller and be held by her mommy and daddy.