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...