Portland trip, day 3

Today was a garden day for me, so I doubt most of you will be particularly interested in most of these pictures! 🙂 One of the things I wanted to do on this trip was to visit all the botanical gardens in Portland, which are always nice to visit (even if this isn't remotely one of my normal interests). Anyways, skip to the end if you want to see some of the teaser pictures from the actual stores I went to today...

This first set of pictures is from the Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden, one of Portland's city-owned botanical gardens.

If you can't tell, I was quite interested in that bridge, which forms the main entrance to the gardens. I was trying to get a little artsy with some of these pictures... that's really not my normal thing to do, and it really shows. 🤷‍♂️

My other garden stop was the Elk Rock Gardens, which is run by some religious organization in a very fancy area south of Portland proper.

The garden itself has more of a woodland feel, and isn't quite as interesting as some of the others I've been to. But it's greatest asset (other than nostalgia -- my family often went here on our Portland trips while I was growing up) is the views out over and along the Willamette River (which are even better in person -- the trees really get in the way of photo taking). In the last picture, if you zoom way in, you can see a MAX (light rail) train just to the left of the building with the funny roofline (and slightly further left of the orange building) -- I'll be riding transit pretty much all day tomorrow, though I don't know whether I'll take that line (the new Orange Line) or not.

Getting back to the retail content... today I visited a bowling-themed Target:

(I promise this will make more sense when I get to the full post...)

A Fred Meyer with a very unusual decor:

(Same as above)

And a particularly beautiful Safeway:

(No context needed, it's just awesome!).



These, of course, are tightly-cropped versions of full pictures that I will upload when it is time for the full store post. I think this is going to be my way of doing teaser photos from now on -- yesterday's were mostly full pictures that are probably going to be repeated, and that's probably boring for everyone involved!


For those of you who made it all the way to the end of this very long post -- it's the first of the month, and that means music recommendations! This month's pick is Bastille's 2nd and 3rd albums, which I have been listening to on repeat throughout this trip. Thanks go to Retail Retell for tipping me off to their existence with his music recommendations a couple weeks ago -- I've liked their first album since it came out, but I somehow totally missed that they had more than just the one!