Day 5: U.S. and Canada West Coast Drive

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Portland

We grabbed breakfast at our hotel in Red Bluff, CA. then started our drive to Portland, OR.

Lake Shasta Caverns National Natural Landmark was on our list to do if we felt like it when we were in the area, but we felt like continuing our drive instead of stopping, so we didn’t visit there. Doing a tour of Lake Shasta Caverns does look like an interesting things to do though.

Before talking about our time in Portland, I’ll share some helpful links on parking and transportation for Portland.

Click here for information on public parking in Portland, OR

Click here for information on the parking mobile pay app called Parking Kitty that Portland uses. We found Parking Kitty to be very convenient and easy to use.

Click here for information on parking at the International Rose Test Garden or the Portland Japanese Garden or how to get to either location via public transportation or walking. (The Japanese Garden is directly above the International Rose Test Garden.)

Click here for information on Hop Fastpass, which is how you can pay for Portland’s public transportation fares via your phone or a Hop Card. And click here for the current Hop fares. (We did not need to use the public transportation in Portland, but the Hop fares, especially the Day Pass fare, are fairly priced. At the time of this writing in April 2024, a Day Pass for an adult is $5.60.)

Click here for information on Portland’s neighborhoods.

Click here for Downloadable Portland Maps.

Click here to find food carts in Portland, of which there are many in Portland.

Back to the story. It was a long drive from Red Bluff, CA to Portland, OR. After checking into our motel in north Portland, we drove to Prost! for dinner and beer.

Prost! is a fun, indoor pub offering German beers and German food. Outside of Prost! is Prost! Marketplace, which consists of food carts that surround the left side and the rear side of Prost! along with picnic tables and seats under a partly covered, lit area and, the entire time we were there on a Saturday evening, a live band was playing. Prost! Marketplace offers a wide variety of food choices.

Prost! is very lively, and the loud music playing outside could be heard quite well inside of Prost!. Prost! is about people enjoying food, beer, loud music and other people’s company. Both of us really liked the bier cheese soup a lot – it was very good! We noticed a lot of people were ordering the pretzels, so maybe those are good as well.

The employees inside of Prost! are dressed in traditional German attire, and some of the customers inside the pub and in the food cart area outside were dressed in traditional German attire as well.

Prost! is located on North Mississippi Avenue, which is worth visiting if you’re in Portland. There’s a mix of architecture, mostly older, and a mix of things to do. You’ll find restaurants, bars, music venues, different types of shops, and even more food carts than the ones at Prost! Marketplace.

Prost! is located on the corner of N Mississippi Ave and N Skidmore St. We took a stroll down N Mississippi Ave starting at Prost! and headed south and stopped at N Fremont St.

A little before the corner of N Mississippi Ave and N Fremont St is a quaint food cart area tucked quietly off the sidewalk. One of the food carts in that food cart area is Little Bloom Lao and Thai Cuisine. My husband is from Laos, but unlike Thai restaurants, Lao Restaurants aren’t easy to find, at least not in our area and many places we’ve visited, so my husband was really looking forward to getting food from there.

(My husband ended up eating the Lao food from Little Bloom Lao and Thai Cuisine after we got to the parking lot for Pittock Mansion. We both thoroughly enjoyed the two items we got – Nam Khao, which is Crispy Rice Salad with Ground Beef and as an appetizer Cheun Yaw, which is a Lao Egg Roll. The Lao Egg Rolls are very similar to Vietnamese Egg Rolls.)

With Lao food in hand we headed north on the other side of Mississippi Ave back to our car. We then drove on nearby N Williams Ave just to see it, then drove to Pittock Mansion, which I’ll talk more about later when I get to those photos on this page.

From the neighborhood Prost! is in, we drove to Pittock Mansion. The mansion (click here for admission fees) was closed for tours at the time we visited, but the grounds were open.

Not only are the grounds lovely, but due to the location of the property high up on a hill, you get a great view of Portland. Currently (as of 2024) the grounds are open and free to the public until 9 p.m. every day.

While the grounds were free to visit, the parking does have a fee. This link shows the current parking fees.

We spent a little over twenty minutes in all, but there are trails to walk that would have taken more time if we chose to do so. We both enjoyed the time we spent there.

After visiting the grounds of Pittock Mansion we each got a warm drink and went back to our Motel to relax because we didn’t feel like walking around in the rain.

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