Portland in April: Friday

Friday, April 11

Mark and I took a Lyft to the Eugene Amtrak station, where we boarded the 4 PM train to Portland. Mark has warmed up to the train, I think; for weekend getaways it makes sense: the drive to and from Portland is usually no fun, and parking the car downtown for a few days is expensive. I always think the train ride through the Willamette Valley is interesting because one gets to see the hidden sides of various towns and cities, and the views of farmland and the country are more bucolic than they are from Interstate Five.

The train filled up as we travelled north; Mark was glad that he’d purchased our tickets a few days prior. Just after Salem, we decided to get a light dinner snack. The attendant in the dining car was the most disgruntled Amtrak employee I’ve ever encountered. Maybe disgruntled is the wrong word, because he had friendly advice about the food selection, even if it was “I don’t eat any of this stuff; they don’t pay me enough to.” The conductors were hanging out in the dining car, trading horror stories about getting shunted to a side line for hours to wait for freight trains. One conductor in particular kept sharing mile stones and times and practically did a victory dance when we passed a particular landmark before a certain time. We made good time, with only one moment of being shunted to a sideline to allow a freight train to disembark from the Portland station. We detrained around 7:30.

We exited the train station and set out for the Benson Hotel. This required skirting the west edge of the Chinatown District, crossing Burnside, and skirting the east edge of the downtown bus mall. Even when I was attending Reed, this part of Portland has never been the happiest part of town, and we had to navigate around dog (at least I hope it was dog) poop, “gentlemen’s clubs,” one-person tents, and folks in varying states of mental crisis. No one was threatening, but it was a sad commentary on how social support networks have some pretty large holes in them.

We arrived at the Benson’s chandeliered and Russian pine colonnaded lobby and strode past the bar and upholstered couches to the main desk. We had to reassure the receptionist that we were fine after our ten minute walk from the train station.

We managed to summon an elevator with our room cards. The elevators were mirrored on all sides, which sometimes made locating the floor buttons tricky. A display board on the right side showed playbills and posters of famous visitors to the hotel. Mariah Carey, in a low-cut, spangly dress, appeared to lean out over her frame, prompting Mark to make a comment about “boobies.”

Our room was compact and perfect as a base for a weekend of urban hikes and adventures. The doors in our part of the floor looked like they were the originals, dark wood with lighter inlays of a shield displaying an entwined OH monogram (possibly for “Hotel Oregon”). Farther down, the south side of the hall, the doors and hardware changed to something post 1940; we surmised that the Benson had expanded at some time and combined with another building.

Since we were starving, we set off (saying “Hi,” to Mariah again, followed by a short rendition of “Fame! / I’m going to live forever…” ) for dinner. Mark said I was in charge of getting us to food, and I wanted to show him Huber’s, a bistro I had eaten at last May while attending DrupalCon. I’d enjoyed the wood paneling, the brass details, and the Art Deco / Arts-and-Crafts architecture. We walked east on Harvey Milk Boulevard; after a slight moment of confusion, we arrived at Hueber’s—which was closed for a week of spring cleaning!

After casting about downtown Portland we ran into an Iraqi restaurant called “Dara Salon.” A huge mural of the Ishtar Gate dominated the western wall of the restaurant, and Iraqi artifacts decorated the entire space. The charming decor was somewhere between Eugene Bellydance and (more) Metropolitan Museum of Art Middle Eastern Gift Shop. The food was great, and I ate a lot of felafel.