Portland is a special part of the US. I can’t think of very many cities anywhere in the world like this one. It really is a small college town that acts like a major US city. You can pretty much count the number of skyscrapers on one hand, the airport really doesn’t handle many planes other than the smaller CRJ700 regional planes, and I am positive that the number of trees in the city outnumbers the population.
Portland is hippie. I don’t know how to phrase that any differently. You would probably find more beards in Portland than Yemen. I was trying to find something to eat at one of the 6 million coffee shop/cafes, doing my usual 20 questions about the food preparations, when the girl working behind the counter asked “are you allergic to gluten?”. I agreed, and she proceeded to recommend four different special meals they could put together. I ended up settling on the Caesar salad, no dressing, no croutons, add salmon, add almonds, and with a gluten free lime/cilantro dressing. It was good. The type of gluten free good that only hippies could come up with.
The down side to Portland is the microbrew culture. There is some great beer here, and I can’t drink any of it.
Overall impression:
Understanding people, check. Quaint waterfront and small town feel, check. Hippies to feed you as many goji berries as you can digest, check. Just make sure you drive the speed limit, which is 50mph in most places. Oregon has the most aggressive cops when it comes to speeding. Trust me, I speak from experience.
Tags: Oregon
The Gluten Free Travel Blog 
August 20, 2010 at 09:08 |
PS If you return I found that http://www.glutenfreeportand.com was an amazing resource – used it to scope out some options when I travelled there in the spring.
September 5, 2010 at 20:16 |
Thanks Jenn! I’ll be in Portland late September! I will check it out!