Dog Mountain

Well, this was one of my worst ideas. Yesterday, J. and I hiked up Dog Mountain in the Gorge.  Here’s the gist: 3.6 or so miles to the top, and then back down. A mere 2,950 feet of elevation over that descent.  The views were great, true, but they were few and far between. The rest involved a lot of panting, grunting, sweating, and staring up at each new endless switchback, sometimes hallucinating that the top was just around the corner. (It never was).  Here is a short video panning the view at one of the midpoint clearings.

And here’s a few photos from the top:

Sure, ponder the beauty, but then ponder how a 7 mile hike took us almost 5 hours total, not including drive time to get to the trailhead.  The ascent was hell on my heart, and the descent absolutely killed my knees.  After reasoning that we’d probably killed about a trillion calories, we decided on a dinner of New York strip steaks, potatoes, green beans, and, for a dessert, a massive plate of fruit and cheese.  Not one but two bottles of wine were administered to soothe our aching joints.

The moral of the story is that I’m glad I can say I did this hike, but I’m sure as hell never doing it again.

The PDX Food Trough Gazette

Don’t think that just because I’m not blogging I’m not living the good life. Au contraire. If my life were a sine wave, I’d be at the crest right now.  The top. The good part. The opposite of the trough.

New job, newish boyfriend, a mild winter, spring around the corner, a handful of great trips coming up: camping at Nehalem Bay State Park, a friend-visit trip to cosmopolitan Champaign, Illinois, a road trip down to L.A. by way of San Francisco and Highway 1 for several days there (plus Disneyland!), and more to come for sure.

It occurs to me that I need to blog about the Portland bars, restaurants, and entertainment options that I check out, so that you (yes, you) will be enticed to come visit.

• Brunchbox is one of Portland’s most beloved and well-reviewed food carts. They really only do breakfast sandwiches and burgers, but that doesn’t do them justice.  I went there today to try their Youcanhascheezburger, which is a burger patty sandwiched between two Texas-toast grilled cheese sandwiches. It was exactly as good and as deadly as it sounds.  I have no interest in trying the “Redonkadonk,” an egg/ham/spam/bacon/American cheese burger between two grilled cheeses.  Because we all have our limits.
• Metrovino is a relatively new restaurant and wine bar in the Pearl. Thanks to a last-minute invite from Jacob, I took advantage of their Monday night bar special last night: a $5 burger and a $5 glass of bubbly.  This was one of those high-end burgers that was almost too good for words.  Has anyone come up with a better happy hour combo than burgers and bubbly? Didn’t think so.  I’d like to go back for their wine, because they use Enomatic machines to preserve their bottles, which allows you to try tastes of a wide range of wines that generally aren’t available by the glass elsewhere.  I can’t afford an $85 bottle of Burgundy, but $5 for a 2-oz taste seems like a bargain.
• Pine State Biscuits. Exhibit A: The McIsley.
• Bakery Bar. Exhibit B: The Number 3 Egg Sandwich.
• Spints is the best thing to happen to my neighborhood since, well, ever.  It’s a little hard to describe – German beer, Bavarian-inspired food, good wine list, great cocktails, and a really cozy low-lit atmosphere.  I’ve been there several times for dinner, dessert, and just drinks, and except for one lackluster dessert everything’s been spot-on.  The prices are eminently reasonable, and so far it looks like they’ve found their niche.
• Jam is a brunch spot on Hawthorne that vies for a slot in Portland’s top 5 or 10 breakfast/brunch/lunch spots.  Because Portland is big on brunch.  I’ve never seen a town so brunch-obsessed other than New York, of course.  There’s not a lot to say about Jam except that their food is uniformly excellent and their lemon ricotta pancakes might be the best breakfast item I’ve ever had in my life.
• In other food cart news, there’s a pod of carts pretty close to my office that I hit every few weeks or so.  The Portland Soup Company is a newbie there, and they’re so friendly it hurts.  Tomato reggiano, white bean cassoulet with house-cured lardons, potato-leek with rosemary crème…Well.  These guys know their soup, and their pork-butt sandwiches, and their salads.

So, you know. Good things afoot. Portland’s waiting for you, you in particular.

Destination Newport

J. and I headed out to the Oregon coast this past weekend to attend the Newport Seafood & Wine Festival with some of his friends. As we drove out there Saturday morning we heard news about the Chilean earthquake and the then-impending tsunami that was expected to hit Hawaii and maybe parts of the West Coast.  It was a little gray when we got to Newport, but from that point on the sun was out and the weather was almost inconceivably nice for late February.  No tsunami warnings either.

The festival was a little more casual than I’d been expecting. And by “casual,” I mean it was a frat party disguised as a wine festival.  We got there around 10:30 am and the crowds weren’t too bad, but by mid-afternoon, it was packed with groups of 20- and 30-somethings who donned matching brightly-colored sweatshirts with dumb wine-related slogans, like “Forgive us Father, for we have Zinned.”  Let me reiterate – they had these sweatshirts specially made for this little event.  It was crowded, hot under the tent, loud, and, after awhile, kind of gross.  People were drinking to get absolutely, no-holds-barred hammered. When we left around 4 pm, cops were arresting folks left and right for public intoxication. I suddenly understood why most of the wineries there were small and of a not-so-great pedigree – they just wanted to sell glasses and tastes, not gain future customers per se.  Men in crab hats, women with wine-holders hanging around their necks – no kids, thank god.

The rest of the weekend was lovely. We stayed in a hotel right on the beach and though the price of our room was twice as high due to the festival, the ocean view was worth it in spades.  We had a nice dinner with a big group (clam chowder is gross, ladies and gentlemen), visited our friends’ rented house, almost broke into another house that we thought belonged to our friends, walked on the beach a few times, had lunch at the Rogue World Headquarters, and went to the Newport Aquarium before we headed back to Portland on Sunday.  The aquarium is worth a trip – sea otters, seals, sea lions, the world’s shyest octopus, puffins, jellyfish…not to mention a walk-through tunnel with sharks looming overhead. Look at this photo J. took!

The Oregon coast really is beautiful.  It’s cold and grey and virtually impossible to swim in the ocean, even in August, but what it lacks in accessibility it makes up for with its rugged good looks.