Day 4

 Day 4 - Portland

We got up this morning and headed to Becky's Diner; where we sat outside on the upstairs deck and had a really good breakfast.  The coffee was a little strong for my taste, but the French toast was delish.

We then headed out on the Portland Fire Engine tour.  Parking was highway robbery - $24 for 2 hours, then $7 for every subsequent hour...  The tour itself was great though.  It was a good orientation of the city and it was cool to sit in a refurbished fire truck.   Apparently, Portland has almost burnt to the ground 3 different times!    Once the fire engine tour was complete we walked back to the car to regroup.  The custom's house was a brief walk from where we were so we decided to walk over it for a few pictures; Mama elected to rest in the car so Jack, Linda, and myself headed out.

The customs house is quite pretty and I wanted to go in but it had a doorbell you needed to ring to be let in.   I never would have rang it; Linda on the other hand had no problem ringing it and asking to come inside.   A very nice customs officer - Jeff, let us in even though he wasn't supposed to and gave us a brief tour.   He was very knowledgeable of his building and went out of his way to share tidbits; it was really great and the building itself was beautiful.   He also gave us a tip to go on top of the parking deck for some great photos...  So, we did.  We left there and went to the Customs house parking deck; ignoring the no photo signs and proceeded to take a ton of great pictures.   The security guard walked by us and I just knew he would say something, but he let us be.     We then headed back to Mama but went through this ally way Jeff also told us about that had a great murrell painted on it; Jeff was awesome :)

Once we got back to Mama I was going to extend the parking; given it was only $7 at this point, but... we were 4 minutes late and it wanted me to pay $24 more; can you say HELL NO!   So we got in the car and drove to the East Promenade area to take some pictures; we then drove to the West area to take pictures and generally drove all around Portland stopping at random places to take a photo.   I eventually took us down to the Flatbread restaurant where we parked in the parking deck (another great photo op) and went and had lunch on their patio.  I had a custom-ordered pizza and lemonade; both were delish.   The server was great, the atmosphere was nice and I generally just enjoyed it.

After lunch we walked up to the Henry Woodsworth house that Mama wanted to see; it was only .7 miles and I thought it would be fairly flat.  So the plan was to walk to it; come back to the car and then drive to the Portland Observatory.   Well, the walk up to the house was nice; lots of random sculptures and neat things to take pictures of.   At some point, a gentleman tried to talk to Linda about the fact they are legalizing mushrooms for recreational purposes soon.... Yeah, we are hoping right on that 🤣  But what ti was not was flat; it had some pretty good inclines so once we got there we figured we would walk onto the Observatory given we had done the hills already...

How little did we know; the walk to the Observatory was another .7 miles but about 1/2 in we realized a good chunk of it was largely up a massive hill.   My Mama bless her did it; every step.  I carried her O2 most of the afternoon as we didn't have her walker (Portland streets are not exactly walker-friendly) so that had some comedy in itself.    We always get hung around a tree or one of us stops w/o telling the other one because we forget we are connected.  It's funny - at about 1/2 through Jack took my camera bag to lessen some of the weight on me.+    But we made it and we took pictures of the building, and then walked back down.  The walk back to the car was .5 miles and all downhill so that was good.

We were almost to the car and as we passed a man Mama barked; yes barked like a dog.  I thought she was barking at the man and about died; when she was actually barking because of the 02 and trying to make a joke; to say the least it fell really flat, lol.

Once at the car we got settled and drove to see the little bug lighthouse; it's at a park and we got there right as the sun was setting; it was beautiful.   A nice way to end the day.

We then came back to the hotel; and agreed on a meeting time for in the morning as no one is really interested in dinner and called it a day.    Jack and I went back out to grab Mama a new purse; the one she brought with her was falling apart and grabbed a couple of sandwiches for dinner.

I'm sure there are things we didn't see or do in Portland, but I think we saw most of it...   Jack said we walked a little over 6 miles! 

Jack's favorite part of the day was:  Jack liked the customs' house; he liked the history and the details of it.  Little things like the air quality in the building was bad back in the day due to them smoking and lighting it with oil lamps.  He loved the detail on the door where they changed the time at some point to 4:30 by sanding it off.   He liked the little lighthouse and observatory.  He said the firetruck road was fun; even though the road was bumpy.   Portland roads are all asphalt over old school dutch brick.