Last week I spent a few days in Portland, Oregon to say goodbye to some old friends and to have a little vacation before packing up my life in New York. I’m nearly ready to go and can now count down the hours until I leave the country for the year. It is an odd feeling, but also very exciting.

Being in Portland was lovely as usual. The weather was unseasonably cold and rainy, which meant that I could do classically Portland things like drink coffee and slowly make my way through two new graphic novel series (Fables and Y: The Last Man – I recommend both highly!). The bike pictured above is my friend Michelle’s – the hostess with the mostess who always makes sure I have a ride while I’m visiting. This is her Meyer lemon tree – in full bloom and as you might expect, lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet.

During my stay with Michelle at her place in the Sunnyside neighborhood I discovered that one of her neighbors had planted raspberry bushes. In their front yard! Hanging over into the street! So I ate lots. It was an amazing snack after coming back from buying a couple of Sharon Jones records downtown earlier that day as a gift for Noam and Rachel. It was sad that I missed her PDX concert the day after I came back to New York, but a couple of her songs are definitely on my ipod for the trip.

My friend Amy happens to be on a West Coast tour right now and she passed through Portland for a couple of days during my visit. I made a point to feed her both cupcakes and doughnuts – and recommend to any of you friends to eat at Saint Cupcake and Voodoo Doughnut. She couldn’t stop thinking about the fat elvis cupcake – banana chocolate chip poundcake cupcake topped with a swirl of salty-sweet peanut butter fudge, finished with a banana chip. I’m partial to either the coconut or the carrot cake. And, as for doughnuts – I dare those of you who eat bacon to try that one. I can’t bring myself to, but it is one of the things they’re famous for. Also, this:

Here’s Amy catching the bus to her hostel. In Portland they have amazingly simple systems for checking the status of your bus on your phone. Sigh. Such a transit paradise.

A couple of days later Michelle and I went on a walk through the local cemetery. On our way, we saw an impressive rainbow:

That’s right, Lone Fir was established in 1855!

We got to see some really interesting headstones:

There were a series of these for “fallen loggers” that look like they were poured cement. Note the invasive ivy climbing up the side! These days there’s a lot of Russians buried in the cemetery and the new thing they seem to do is a lot of laser cut images on the headstones.

So – the next posts will be from places I’ve never been and from adventures I can only begin to imagine. I’m most easily reachable by email as my 503 cellphone is being turned off on Wed night, never to be used again.