Farewell, Oregon - I'll be back!

Yesterday I finally made it to Portland! I've been looking forward to exploring Portland ever since I knew I was taking this trip :) Pedro hooked me up with his friend John who graciously let me spend the night at his house. But in addition to the crash pad, John and his girlfriend also served as fantastic Portland tour guides.

We went out for dinner at Vita Cafe, which is an amazing vegetarian restaurant. I had the closest thing to real chicken fried steak I've ever had since being a vegetarian, and the mashed potatoes with almond gravy were awesome too! After that we did a small pub tour, hitting up BarBar and Amnesia - both very cool, very homey feeling bars.  I think Portland feels pretty similar to Austin, I would have really loved to have run into some live music!

I woke up around 10am this morning, John had made some really interesting suggestions for today, but since I had Phoenix with me I really couldn't do everything on the list. One thing I was really looking forward to finding though was Multonomah Falls - and it happened to be dog friendly too! I believe its the largest water fall in Oregon, and one of the largest in the United States. It was about 30 mins east of town, another beautiful drive with loads of small waterfalls along the way. Multonomah was gorgeous, and somehow even bigger than I expected! The rain let up just long enough for me to make it to the small foot bridge about half way up with falls, so cool!

By the time I made it out of the Visitor's Center the rain had really picked up and it stormed for the rest of today's drive. I gotta say, I've become a much more confident highway driver over the last week, not to say I'm not still extremely cautious, I can just tell that my stress level is going down, especially in the rain. Anyways, I'm here in a small town outside of Olympia, Washington. It's still pouring down rain, but weather.com says it might let up tomorrow!