Sorry if the transition from yesterday's "Seattle - Day Five" to today's "Portland - Day Two" seems abrupt, but despite the vigilance of King Tut in front of the Seattle Amtrak station (and of all the construction), I was able to solve the koan of where the entrance was, and took an Amtrak train yesterday from Seattle to Portland, so yesterday was both Day Five in Seattle and Day One in Portland, making today Day Two in Portland.
Today was something of a lull in the otherwise frenetic activity of the past several days (as documented at the Live site), and I had time to enjoy lunch at the Fifth Avenue food trucks. Unlike the food trucks of Atlanta, the ones here are almost all independently owned, sole enterprises, serving a variety of international cuisines, from Mexican to Thai to Vietnamese to Korean, and even to Hungarian, in a form generally not readily available at most restaurants. I had a delicious bowl of authentic jambalaya from The Cajun Swamp Shack truck, dining al fresco on a bench among the busy office workers of the surrounding high-rise buildings.
One of those businesses had offered me a job back in 2008, an offer I couldn't accept due to the real-estate bubble crash of that same year and my resultant inability to sell my house. I went by that office today and they were gone - I believe the company didn't just relocate their Portland office but actually closed their Portland operation altogether. The moral of this story is that for all my moping about not being able to take advantage of the job offer, I probably dodged a bullet by not throwing my lot in with an office destined to soon go out of business. Who's to say what's good and what's bad?
Anyhow, it seems that food trucks are everywhere in Portland - anywhere downtown there's a parking lot, there's typically at least one food truck parked somewhere in it. Quite an improvement over Atlanta.
Walking around today offered some interesting views. Here's Mt. Saint Helens looming over the I-5 bridge into Washington State.
Here's Mt. Hood lurking behind downtown Portland.
I wonder what really goes on at A Ball Plumbing?
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