.ghost town.

So after Vancouver we drove down to Portland. First we stopped at the outlet mall near Seattle that Jenn raved about. She wanted me to buy her a coach purse, but they were all ugly. I mean, I don't really understand the whole coach/name brand thing to start off with but they did not look good. But I did find some pretty shoes. I do have an issue with shoes. I just love them so much!
Anyways, by the time we made it through terrible traffic on the Monday of the memorial day weekend, it was evening, and we hadn't planned where to stay. So we drove downtown to the peach district I had been told to visit, and popped into a Safeway to ask for directions to a cheap hotel nearby. The first 3 people we talked to all commuted in and didn't know, but one guy offered to use the GPS on his phone. I'm not really sure how that would help since we had no location, but maybe you can search for hotels and things on that? I don't know how they work. But anyways, one of the ladies at the customer service directed us over a bridge and thought there might be some hotels nearby, and sure enough there was one! However, when I saw it Iturned left into it on a street where I wasn't allowed to turn left. Oops! Nothing happened, so it was fine. There was a really cute Indian man who worked there who was a recent immigrant. I asked him if they accepted air miles, and he checked his list of acceptable credit cards and said no, just Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx.
We had a nice walk around town that evening, and nothing was open. There were no people around, except for the bikers who almost knocked us over repeatedly on the bridge. We found one cafe open, and the guy was really nice. We walked around and looked in the windows of a whole bunch of art galleries and made sure to check them out the next day.
The next day when we went to the galleries, there was one that had an amazing windown display but the display inside, about books, kind of traumatized us. We went in other galleries which were really great, and one that had some pieces by Picasso and Salvador Dali! But even on this day, the city felt abandoned, and there weren't many people around. We had lunch in a cute little tea restaurant, and then headed for Cannon Beach.