Without coffee, would any of us love the city so much? Coffee is a ritual in which Portlanders engage in so many ways, from knowing the origins of coffee around the world along with their classic flavor profiles (you can’t say “Ethiopia” in the city without evoking the taste and smell of blueberries), to the slow… Read more »

  It’s April 2021 What’s going on around Portland? Let’s start with a day in the middle of spring, shall we? Imagine neighborhoods filled with flowering trees, Portlanders gardening and walking their dogs to coffee early in the morning, sitting in central grassy spaces in the middle of the day with blankets and bikes strewn… Read more »

Daily question from tour guests: “what is your favorite restaurant in Portland?” We can never answer that question so we deflect: “give me a category!” (Our guests: “Thai.” “Burgers.” “Seafood.” Oh dear.) This week we received an email from a future tour guest asking for a “moderately priced restaurant with a great wine list.” The category… Read more »

If you asked me to pick one beautiful thing that sets Portland apart, my answer would be immediate: the forest. No other city has such a large forested park within the city limits, and very few other cities have such magnificent old-growth trees within walking distance of the breweries and coffee shops of the center city…. Read more »

Native American stories infuse geologic features, mountains and waterfalls and monoliths, with stories that give almost everyone a gender. More mountains in the Pacific Northwest are women than men; more monoliths seem to be women too. Because of this and many other things I call the Columbia Gorge by the feminine pronoun. And, despite much… Read more »

Yesterday someone posted a link to an article in the Toronto Sun. “Experience Portland like a local,” the headline read. “Can you point out the errors?” a friend (with a long history in journalism) asked, tagging me in her comments. I clicked over and read the first paragraph. The writer said she enjoyed Portland on previous… Read more »

Our tour guides are all Original Portlandians: we all have lived in a house share, have an opinion about how to brew coffee, and most of us don’t know where our sunglasses are or own an umbrella. We would rather ride our bikes to work, probably, and we know which bus takes you down Division Street and what the fifth quadrant is. We don’t know why, exactly, the Chinese people left Chinatown. We can’t quite figure out how to rationalize the racist past of Oregon with our striving present. We just don’t get why people like Voodoo so much.

Our goal with One Day in PDX is to answer the question, “What would you do with one day in Portland?” every day and for every person a different way. If Portland is any one thing that is superlative; if it is any one other thing it is constantly improving itself. It’s weird, of course it’s weird, but it needn’t say so.