Sunday, September 10, 2017

Portland: Washington Park

Every year, Dan and I try to take a week-long vacation as a couple.  For our 2017 trip, we decided to take a road trip through parts of Oregon and Washington!

At the end of our vacation, Dan and I spent a couple of days in Portland.  I'll be honest, we were pretty worn out after a week of road-tripping, so we took it easy during our stay.  Portland is a great city.  While I think Seattle is more our style, we found that the food and beer in Portland is fantastic (follow-up post coming on that later), and we spent an entire day exploring one area: Washington Park.  We loved that once you get there, you can take shuttles around to different areas.  We hit up three of the big ones!

We love zoos, so we often try to visit AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums when we're traveling to different cities.  This zoo is one of our favorites in the U.S. now, mostly because we absolutely fell in love with their elephant exhibit!  It's also really reasonably priced even for adult tickets, so we were fans.




We seriously could not get over these two elephants, little sister and big brother, as she nudged him to play in the water.  They were so active and animated, and they seemed really happy.  The rest of the elephants entered the water after them too.




Also of note, the restaurant at the zoo entrance is actually really good.  It's not badly priced, and the food was yummy.  So if you're hungry and in the park, it's a safe bet to grab a bite there.


This garden is actually a public park!  You can visit it free of charge.  In 1917, a group of enthusiasts in Portland came up with the idea to have an American rose test garden, and now they are sent tons of roses from all over the world to "house" together here.  There are over 7,000 rose plants of approximately 550 varieties in the gardens.



I was just in love with the variety!  The sizes, the colors... the yellows were probably my favorite (it's my fav color after all!) but the huge roses with a zillion petals made my heart swoon.  Even Dan really enjoyed literally taking time to stop and smell the roses.




This garden involves a LOT of walking, y'all.  So just be prepared.  But it's got eight garden styles and some beautiful settings and zoos.  It's not a cheap price of entry for what you get to see, but if you're at the nearby rose garden it's an easy add-on to your Washington Park visit.  There's also some great views, since you climb a huge hill to get to everything.



Isn't the view stunning?  Mount Hood is there in the background, but being in the Japanese garden I kept thinking it could be Mount Fuji LOL.




Washington Park was probably our favorite place overall in Portland!


P.S.  We really loved our Airbnb (see it here).  It was a little basement efficiency unit for two people (no full kitchen, but we didn't need one!) with separate entrance and safe neighborhood for walking.  It was nice and cozy, and we loved the area and its restaurants.  Sign up for Airbnb here with my referral link for $40 off your first trip!

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