Here's the thing: the book series by Jenny Han was actually set in Virginia. But the movies are set in Oregon. Call me biased, but I think it would have been perfectly fine, and perhaps even better, if Movie Peter was committed to UVA instead of Stanford like in the books. 

Nevertheless, I was excited to visit a new state. I have never been to Oregon and I have a goal in life to visit all fifty states (and all mlb ball parks) so I was pretty excited for this three day excursion. So, on Tuesday, my brother, his wife, and I packed the car and drove the three hours to Portland, Oregon!

To be honest, it was not what I expected. It was kind of like a smaller Seattle but by the river rather than the Puget Sound or Lake Union. It was very clear to me that they had been hit hard by COVID and the BLM events-- needless to say, 2020 was a hard year for Portland. 

The first night, we got Tapas and settled in for the days ahead of us! The trip was shorter but with everything in Portland closed, we seemed to fit a lot of the "staples" in in the few days we were there. 

My brother recommended that we block out a part of our day to go to Powell's Books and I am glad we did. I think we spent about three hours in that massive bookstore. Powell's Books is the largest independent bookstore. They have new, used, and rare books in this massive store. It occupies an entire city book and is over 68,000 square feet. The store has nine color-coded rooms and over 3,500 sections and in 2009, they were buying around 3,000 used books a day.

We then went for a walk around the city and found ourselves at the waterfront. We had dinner at a nice restaurant on the other side of the city and then went to one of my favorite attractions of the entire place -- a smores bar. It was called the 1927 Smores Company and it was such a highlight of the trip, despite the fact that we had spent maybe 10 minutes in there. This company needs to go nationwide because it was revolutionary to me. 

The next day, we walked to VooDoo Donuts and then picked up some Blue Star Donuts. These were two famous Portland Donut shops that needed to be compared to side by side. I honestly might have liked Voo Doo Donuts better because they were more fun and less sweet than Blue Star. I compared the horchata donuts side by side and found myself liking Voo Doo more, which was almost surprising as the general opinion was that Blue Star was a clear winner. Either way, I loved trying all of the desserts around Portland. 

The city was not at all what I expected but I think perhaps it was a different city prior to the pandemic. It did reaffirm my love of the Pacific Northwest and how much greenery is around though. I will say, finding all of the 'must see' places that you read about on Pinterest was quite easy considering they were near by other landmarks that you might have already been meaning to try!