Monday: Dinner, Bridge Walks, and Early to Bed

I'm not sure why I ended that last post right then...

Oh well.

We walked a few of the bridges, and took some neat pictures...

This is a view of the Steel Bridge from the Broadway St. Bridge. We walked across the Broadway Bridge, down past the Rose Garden Arena, and back over that Steel Bridge to the west side of town. A few metro rails go over that Steel Bridge, and it is a rocking scary time when you're on foot.

The Broadway St Bridge is a drawbridge deal, and this is a picture of my shoe spanning a gap on the walkway, with the Willamette River visible far below:

Here's the west side of Portland:

This is one of the streets leading up the way to the basketball arena. They'll always love Clyde Drexler around these parts:

This is a working factory of sorts, but I thought it looked cool from the Steel Bridge:

Later that night we explored the town looking for a brewpub that we hadn't heard of to try their beer and grub. We settled in an old saloon looking spot called McManimans, which turned out to be a Northwest chain of exclusive hotels. They'd purchased Renglers, which was the name of the beer makers on the spot, and had the sense to retain the name and beer recipes. The beer was okay, but we are pretty tough to blow away nowadays, and the food was fine.

It was a nice slow Monday night, and the bartender was very honest and candid with his opinion on the beer his employers made. He was certainly professional.

We went to bed early that night just to make it out to a cool tram ride the next morning. We were going to do a bike tour, but what we thought was our departure time turned out to be the arrival time in Long Beach, which put an end to the bike plans. For a place that perceived as hilly, or mountainous, Portland is remarkably flat, and since most everything is so close to everything else, biking seems like a perfect way to commute and/or explore.

See some upcoming posts on The Observatory for some more random pictures of Portland.