It was another day of house hunting, this time on the south side of town. I fortified myself for this effort with a giant glass of green tea along with the last slice of chocolate banana bread. Since we were only looking at neighborhoods, not the insides of houses, we brought the dogs with us because we noticed so many parks the day before.
The houses and neighborhoods of the three potentially acceptable houses we found were less walkable than the one we thought might be ok the day before, but the lots were generally bigger. All require using a car to get anywhere, as there is limited transit available. If we decide to go with a less expensive house at first, walkability and transitability will be the first things to go. Luckily, there are loads of parks within a 5 minute drive from any place we choose. One of those was Woodstock park, where we took the dogs for their first park of the day.
We got hungry about half way through our search and we remembered a great burger place not too far from where we were looking, called The HUB. Margaret, you'll remember this restaurant as where we decided to do our challenge! Good memories. Also, great black bean burger. Best of all, they allowed dogs on their front patio, so the four of us went there to enjoy our lunch.
Sitting on the front patio meant ordering from the bar and being served on paper plates, which was kind of fun. We still got our drinks in glass steins (they are also a brewery), with Brian having an "English session beer" (whatever that means) and I had an ice tea. We both had black bean burgers with tomato and onion (which I picked off), lettuce, bell pepper slices and avocado. Brian's had cheese as well. The cheese helped hold the sandwich together a bit, and for that reason only, I was half wishing that I had some on my sandwich, too. Still, even if it was a bit crumbly, it tasted great, so we were pretty happy.
After lunch we continued on our house journey with no luck at all, and a firm understanding of why Brian's mom suggested we not look much past 70th for houses. As we started back for home, we noticed we were near my brother's neighborhood so we called to see if he was around. He wasn't, but then we noticed we were near Mt. Tabor, an east side neighborhood volcano, so we decided to take the dogs over there. That was super fun! You can either take the copious stairs to the top of the hill/mountain/volcano, or take one of many foot trails, or on Wednesdays they close the streets to cars and you can walk those. We did a bit of each. On top of Mt. Tabor, there is a beautiful view, which we enjoyed until we got annoyed at the new age yoga girls' ceaseless chatter.
As we walked away from the yoga girls, we were stopped by a spectacular view of Mt. Hood off in the distance. Mt. Hood is an enormous, snow covered volcano that hasn't blown yet, which makes its top peaked and pointy. A couple of older men were taking pictures, so we stopped to chat with them about the view. It turns out that they were from Annapolis, Maryland and that they were both retired. One of them had his last day of work a mere three weeks before. Both of their wives were still working, in fact, the wives were attending a conference in Portland, and the husbands were left with the difficult task of touring pubs and parks of Portland! They even had brand new hats from Hair of the Dog, a microbrew pub they had tried for lunch. We promised to give it a try soon, and we parted ways.
Coming down from the peak, we of course got lost, but at least we found the restrooms. That made finding ourselves much more comfortable. We weren't lost for long, and once we found our car, we made our way home. By the time we got home, I was completely wiped out again. Luckily, we had some left over risotto from a couple of days ago, so we had that with the rest of the romanesco (the fractal veggies from a couple of posts ago). I decided to have some chocolate sorbet and an oatmeal cookie for dessert. I should have had a pear, which I keep meaning to eat and keep forgetting about. I'll do that today, I guess.
That is about it for yesterday. Be happy and healthy!
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