When it is gray and hazy outside, and also nasty, icky hot, and the entire region is blanketed with a layer of smoke so thick that the air resources board is telling everyone not to even bother going outside, no matter how healthy your lungs might be, it can be a very good thing to get out of town. Especially when getting out of town involves going to someplace that it not nearly as hot, and also about 100% less smokey.
Friday afternoon Richard dropped me off at the airport, and then pulled out our little GPS unit to try to figure out how to get back home without using freeways (since the massive construction project on I-5 is still ongoing), and I twiddled my thumbs at the gate until my older sister showed up, and shortly after that, we boarded a very tiny little plane and took off for Portland. Through the convenient use of cell phones, and also the fact that we were all wearing hot pink t-shirts that proclaimed ‘What Happens With the Sisters Stays With the Sisters’, courtesy of my older sister for precisely this sort of occasion, we managed to track down our younger sister, and then the three of us, with a brief detour into a Starbucks for some life-fortifying caffeine, trundled our suitcases off to the parking garage, fielding curious looks and clever queries like ‘oh, are you all sisters?’ Because, you know, the t-shirts weren’t a dead giveaway or anything.
Anyway. Off we drove to the Kennedy School hotel, where we would be staying for the next few days.
The Kennedy school used to be a public elementary school, before it was closed due to lack of funding to bring it up to code. At some point in the last ten years, a company bought it, refubished it, and turned it into a hotel. The principal’s office is where you check in, and the old cafeteria has been converted to a nice little restaurant, and all the classrooms were split in half and turned into hotel rooms.
Our room used to be the back half of a classroom, which means we got the coat closet.
We also got a small chalkboard.
(My older sister is writing “I will not call my sister a boogerbrain.” Why yes, we *are* all 12. Why do you ask?)
We ate dinner that night in the restaurant there in the hotel. It seemed appropriate, somehow, sitting in what used to be an elementary school cafeteria to start the meal with a basket of tater tots. And so everyone would know we had arrived safely and were not having any fun at all, I took this quick picture with my cell phone and fired it off to all the various parents / husbands.
We didn’t really have much planned for the weekend except to just hang out together, which is why we ended up staying up late both nights, talking and catching up. Saturday we ate breakfast at the hotel and wandered around the halls for a little bit, looking at all the artwork they’d hung everywhere. And then we drove to downtown Portland and spent a few hours wandering around the Saturday Market, which is this big open air arts and crafts market with all kinds of fun things to buy and see.
We found this really cute little shop and we bought batik cotton dresses for every girl in the family – the three of us, our mom, and the niece. We split an extremely large fry bread (elephant ear) coated in cinnamon sugar. My little sister got a henna tattoo on the back of her hand. We pondered various crafts and said ‘oh, what a cute idea’ a lot. Luckily my older sister and I came with completely packed carry-on bags, so we couldn’t buy anything because there was simply no room to take it home with us.
Next up, the zoo. We bought all-day passes for the local lightrail system, and figured out which line would take us to the zoo. We ate lunch there, and then set off to see how much we could see of all the critters, including black bears and mountain goats and the oldest whatever-kind-of-penguin-it-was in the US, and so on. There were signs everywhere about how you could get your picture with a Dairy Princess. I expect they were more geared toward the younger set, but my older sister decided that we couldn’t possibly pass up on an opportunity like this, so here you are – my sisters and I and a Dairy Princess. I know. It’s overwhelming, isn’t it.
We’d intended to check out the gardens near the zoo, but by the time we were done with the zoo, we’d about had it with the walking. It didn’t help that it was very hot out. So instead of wandering around outside anymore, we decided to go wander around somewhere with air conditioning. Powell’s Books seemed a great place to do just that!
Sadly we only had about an hour to wander, and it was very hard to remember that I had very little room to bring any books home with me in my carry-on. I did find a knitting book that had to come home with me, however, and my little sister and I had a lot of fun browsing through the huge selection of cookbooks, although I had to nearly drag her away by her hair when the time came for us to leave. But we had to go, because we had dinner reservations at Old Town Pizza, which is supposedly haunted. We did not see any ghosts, but we did get to eat in what used to be the old elevator, and our food was quite delicious anyway.
Saturday night, after all that walking, I decided that taking a dip in the soaking pool at the hotel sounded like a great idea. It’s not deep enough for swimming, but it was plenty warm enough and deep enough to just lounge for a little while. My little sister came into the water with me, and eventually my older sister came out and joined us, until someone from the hotel came out to tell us that the pool was closing, and gently shooed us away.
Sunday morning we decided to take care of the donut requirement of our Sisters weekends, so off we went to downtown Portland again, to Voodoo Doughnuts. They do all sorts of weird things to their donuts, like coat them with Captain Crunch or Cocoa Puffs, or sprinkle them with Tang. Naturally we had to try some of the ‘strange’ ones, so we each got two donuts. My little sister and I teased my older sister about getting boring donuts, but we all dragged out our cameras for pictures of the donuts *we* got. Here are my two donuts – one with Cocoa Puffs, and one that is chocolate, coated in chocolate, stuffed with chocolate.
And here is one of my little sister’s donuts – the Voodoo donut itself.
It’s filled with raspberry jelly, so when you bite into it, it oozes appropriately. It even comes with a pretzel stick, so you can stab it repeatedly in various places, should you feel the need. Definitely one of the more warped sorts of breakfast we’ve ever had.
We didn’t have anything else planned for the day, so we decided it was time to be girly. We found a convenient nail salon and originally just made appointments for pedicures, but ended up having so much fun we decided to do manicures as well. I now have little flowers with little beads in the middle on my thumbs and my big toes. I am not used to having this sort of thing on my nails and it is very distracting, but we all did it together, so what the heck.
I’m not sure that we did much of anything outrageous this trip, which maybe breaks a little with tradition. But staying in the converted elementary school was unique, and eating donuts with Cocoa Puffs and shaped like voodoo dolls was a little out of the ordinary, and so we have decided that as long as there is *something* during the weekend that we have never done before, no matter how small, that can still count.