View over Portland from Mt Tabor Park

So time marches on and I am now finished in the Pacific North West and headed down to San Fransisco.

I would have loved to have spent longer here, but money constrains me and I need to race through the more expensive places a little quicker than I would like in an ideal world.

Along with Seattle and Portland I had intended to travel to North Bend. This town featured in the opening sequence of 90s cult TV show Twin Peaks. I am a massive Twin Peaks/David Lynch fan.

However I got confused.  There are in fact two North Bends: one in Washington and one in Oregon. The one I wanted was in Washington (actually only around thirty miles out of Seattle where I was last week), yet the one I spent my time researching transport links for was the one in Oregon. So it didn’t happen.

I’ll have to come back sometime then; it’s settled.

Portland

Meanwhile it was a sad farewell to Portland. It wasn’t that I had anything left I desperately wanted to do there, but it was a very comfortable place to hang out.

What I enjoyed most was simply trying different cafes, wandering around the vintage shops, sampling some craft beer, trying different foods from the numerous food carts and a spot of simple people-watching.

The food carts are an amazing concept, grouped together in various little spots

As before, I lucked out with my Airbnb and this time I got to have many nice chats over excellent breakfasts with Sandy. Sandy was an interesting woman, taking care of several rental apartments in her neighbourhood. I now know slightly more than I did before about Bitcoin, thanks to her.

Some of my creations, circa 2003

Another notable conversation I had was with Eric the tie-dye man. He moved to Portland from California and now sells his tie-dye stuff at weekends and spends the rest of the week making up his stock.

In another life I left the UK for Spain, intending to sell home made jewellery on market stalls in the South of Spain, much like Eric with his tie-dye.

It didn’t work out for me.

Firstly, Spain is not Portland. The Spanish preferred to buy ‘made in China’ mass produced trash from Claire’s Accessories rather than pay more for something that was handmade and unique. The British expats, the wealthy Marbella set, didn’t buy anything that wasn’t Chanel or Cartier. So all in all nobody, or not enough people, were buying my things.

Lesson leaned: know your customer. I doubt Eric has that problem in Portland.

Anyway here’s a couple more random pictures of Portland:

This was a nice little bar

Some street art

Don’t even know why I found this so funny