Portland on a Monday

For the sake of our sanity, my husband and I took the family on a little weekend getaway this past weekend to make up for the crappy summer we just endured with his tendon rupture, surgery, recovery, etc. We toodled down the coast to Oregon, where we spent a happy two days running around Cannon Beach and reminiscing about all the geeky glory of "The Goonies" (filmed in Cannon Beach) and keeping our eyes peeled for a Spanish doubloon, tossed ashore from the tremendous storm that pummeled our self-catering accommodation the previous evening. (As an aside, it appears that the script writers could have been inspired by a local legend, as a Spanish galleon did sink off the coast there several hundred years ago, "laden with gold" and it has never been found...dum dum dum!)

However, the weather was not entirely conducive to happy ramblings by the sea (see aforementioned "storm"), and we decided to relocate to Portland for our final weekend evening, and enjoy some of the sights that it has to offer. If God had ever had a clearer way of saying, "MISTAKE!", I don't know what it was, but for sure the hour it took us to navigate our way through downtown Portland's morass of one-way streets was a blinking hint. For starters, parts of the city had been closed for the Portland Marathon--oh joy. Fortuitously, this was wrapping up when we arrived, so most streets were reopened. However, not the streets near our hotel (of course), so we had to inch along with everyone else in the single lane allocated to the plebeian motorists. You see, Portland has a snazzy electric tram/train line, and it has its own lane and separate signals (oblique white and yellow rectangles surreptitiously placed on the right at every intersection). This is frustrating for tourists, as you see no one moving and no hint of a reason why, except suddenly a tram whooshes by and you finally figure out after the fourth signal that, oh, over there, those rectangle lights must mean a tram is coming. Helpful, Portland people, oh so helpful.

Then, of course the middle lane is allocated exclusively to buses, and there were a steady number of them bustling about. However, and I hate to be unkind, a large part of the time these lanes, too, were sitting empty, while the poor motorists were all inching along. While I recognize the value of encouraging public transport, I have to ask myself if it's really worth alienating all visitors to your fair city by punishing the car patrons so vindictively? Because alongside these lanes are road markings not covered in any non-Oregon DMV class. We had a double white line separating the bus lane from the car lane, with nary a clue or hint offered to visitors as to what that meant. We just sort of figured out that it meant cars go over here, to the left of the double white line, but then we saw cars cutting into the bus lane to turn left or right and didn't know if that was okay? You see, that is the problem with going outside of the standard playbook for road markings, you leave non-natives scratching their heads and saying, "What the hell does this mean? Can I turn or can I not?" And consequently I am sure that we pissed off our fair share of Oregonians by not turning when we probably could have, just to be on the safe side and avoid getting a ticket.

Which brings up the one-way streets. Now we are quite familiar with Seattle, which has an ample supply of one-way streets. However, Seattle has at least stuck with the sensible route: if you have one way streets, you alternate them, and you allow for turning as required, so people only have to circumnavigate one block at most to reach their destination. Quick, logical, and fairly painless when dealing with one-way streets. Portland, however, has decided (again, for reasons which utterly escape the non-native, and quite possibly escape the natives as well) that seemingly arbitrary "No Right Turn" and "No Left Turn" signs will be placed in succession on roads, leading cars four, five, six, yea even eight blocks further on than they would wish to go. I kid you not people, we were unable to turn for eight blocks. To add insult to injury, we found ourselves forced across bridges by the turn restrictions, then hopelessly trying to turn ourselves around again and playing "Hurry up GPS and recalculate" while trying to find our hotel, and then its appointed parking lot. IT WAS SO BAD MY HUSBAND REFUSED TO MOVE THE CAR FROM THE NON-HOTEL PARKING GARAGE TO THE HOTEL GARAGE ONE BLOCK OVER. For a man committed to parking in the OFFICIAL hotel garage (as if that magically conveys some protection against thievery), that says quite a bit.

Then there was the whole quest for the Portland attractions we were interested in visiting. Columbus Day weekend, not everyone had the day off on Monday, but still, a fair number of folks and their kids are off and possibly looking to do something. We drove to the Japanese garden and got there as it closed at 4 pm on Sunday. Yes, I was a bit pissed about that. Gorgeous fall day, holiday weekend, but hey, our seasonal hours say from 1st October we close at 4, so by golly that is what we do, Indian summer or not! But this is the same irritation I have with attractions here in the Seattle area so I grumbled about it and we said we will see stuff tomorrow, and dragged ourselves hotel-ward. (As a side note I will say it is not a wheelchair friendly garden and was poorly signed as such, which outraged me on behalf of my friend who is in a wheelchair, but I digress.)

We decided after some food and laboriously picking our way back to the hotel (from the opposite direction after finding a restaurant across the river, of course) that we would go to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), which has a great reputation and is supposedly great for kids, families, etc. Woohoo! And woke up the next day to find that it was closed. On a Monday. Because it's apparently always closed on Mondays, except for certain holiday weekends. But not Columbus Day weekend, because Portland schools don't take that as a holiday, don't you know? No, you didn't know that? We didn't either, and I doubt any tourists to Portland on a holiday weekend know it. And the Portland Children's Museum? Closed on Mondays. Which, quite frankly, boggles my mind. Seattle has about the same population, and by some amazing feat the Seattle Children's Museum manages to keep their doors open seven days a week. The Seattle Science Center during the winter closes on TUESDAYS...in other words, they avoid closing on days which are likely to be holidays, like Mondays or Fridays. Hmmmmmmm, Portland, I think you could learn a lesson about being tourist friendly from your city neighbor to the north!

So we could have gone to the Portland zoo, but frankly it felt like a waste of money to go to the zoo in Portland, when have two perfectly good zoos here at home. We could have gone back to the Japanese garden when it was open (or the Chinese garden for that matter), but facing the tranquility of an Asian garden with 3 refreshed, energized children first thing in the morning is quite a bit different from facing it with 3 tired, more compliant children in the brilliance of the midafternoon, before the witching hour sets in. Faced with the prospect of continually telling them not to touch things and "Stop! No!", annoying the other guests, we decided to beat feet along the one way, no turn paths toward home. We did stop and enjoy the kids' first corn maze, which was fun and the same cost as the garden would have been. Somehow it was far more satisfying to plunk $12 into the hand of the family matriarch who helped plant the corn than it would have been to give it to the garden wardens, I think. No, I don't think we'll be heading back to Portland by choice any time soon. The annoyance factor vs. payoff is just too high. Now, to search for a Spanish doubloon in Cannon Beach...well, that I think we might handle again...