Friday, September 23
We are staying at Jantzen Beach RV Resort, which is on Hayden Island, in the Columbia River between Portland and Washington state. It's a nice place to stay, with paved sites, grass and trees, cable TV, etc, and even has a Barnes & Noble across the street (Mark visited it within hours of arrival). I turned on the TV and watched the news about Hurricane Rita, hoping that it wouldn't be as devastating as Katrina was. I can't believe how many people have been trying to leave; we watched them sitting in their cars, trying to get out of town but stuck in traffic. How frustrating and scary that would be.
We'll be here until Monday or so, while we look for a place to rent in Portland. We want a six-month rental, while we figure out if we can deal with the rainy weather here, and if so, which neighborhood we want to buy a place in.
We want to rent near our friend Judy, who lives in a loft in the "cultural district" of Portland (near the museums, along Park Avenue). So we've been looking on the web for apartments, condos and homes for rent near her, or else in the Pearl District (the old warehouse district, which is quickly filling with expensive lofts, restaurants and funky stores). I compiled a list of 21 apartment complexes in or around downtown, and yesterday I called them all to see who has apartments available (preferably 2-bedroom ones)...that we can afford. Okay, so the list of 21 dwindled down to 4 candidates, with some others who have 1-bedrooms. We'd really like a 2-bedroom, in case anyone visits us, so they can stay in Katie's room and she can come in with us.
Also, we need to find something with a dining room or a big enough living room so that Mark can set up a desk and table to work from home. So we were a little worried, since we only have four candidates. We decided to see our best chance first. It's an apartment on 21st Avenue, about 13 blocks from Judy. It seems a little far away from her part of downtown, but it's got three units with 2 bedrooms, coming available at the right time. Also, on the phone he said he has the biggest 2-bedrooms in town.
Now, we have a history of occasionally buying just about the first thing we see (like this RV for instance), and so we drove out and found Portland Towers, but just before we headed in, Mark and I agreed not to sign anything until we've seen more places; after all, we had all day and nothing else to do until we met Judy for dinner at 5:30 at her place.
So we absolutely loved the first place we saw. It was a third floor apartment with 1280 square feet, in a building built in 1949. The windows wrapped around and are on three sides, giving neat views of the city. There's a ballpark across the street, so Mark could almost watch the game from our living room (except for a roof over some of the seats blocking most of the view). There's a grocery store three blocks away and light rail just a block away, and the price was right. Also, the living room is so big and open that Mark would have plenty of room for his office, as well as our living room stuff. It had two bedrooms and two baths, and utilities were included in the rent. We even liked the mocha color on the walls and the new carpet. The only downsides were the old kitchen and bathrooms and the location being a ways from the park & museum district. Mark started mouthing to me "I like it" over the manager's shoulder, and I knew he wanted to sign up then and there.
We gave the manager a check to hold the apartment while we looked around some more, and then we walked around the neighborhood, elated by our good luck. We'd found a neat place, and could look around for something even better. We headed off to see one that was only 2 blocks away, behind this one, up the hill a little.
That complex is called King Towers, and was built by the same architect as Portland Towers, in the same year (1949), so the elevators are old, but the building has some elegance and charm. Here it is:
We looked at a 10th floor apartment that had the exact same layout as the first place we saw, but ugly old blue carpeting and only 1.5 baths (someone yanked a tub for some reason). But the views are even better. Here is the living room, seen from the entry hall:
Around the livingroom, there is an open dining room and then a kitchen. Here is a view looking towards them, from the living room. Aren't the windows great?
Here's one more look, of part of the view through the windows. Mt. St. Helens is out there, but hard to see in the distance:
We saw a couple other apartments in King Towers, but liked this one the best. The rent was $65 higher than at Portland Towers, though, and so we decided to keep looking around town. Next we drove down to Park Avenue, and looked at one there. It was really small compared with the others, and $200 more expensive. That's the same thing we found in the Pearl too. Here is one we liked, other than its size. Here's the living room (that would also have to be Mark's office:
We loved the tall window, but there's no great view. It had a balcony to the side of the living room, which was fabulous:
and a really nice, new kitchen:
So the decision was, did we want a new, hip, smaller place, or an older one in a less desirable neighborhood, but cheaper, bigger and with a great view. We decided to go with the view. We drove back to King Towers to look at the blue carpet room again, and told the really nice assistant manager there (Kimber) that if she could change the carpet out and the price to Portland Towers, we'd take it. She agreed to the carpet and came down in her price, and we took it. We were really excited about it. It has new kitchen cabinets and completely new bathrooms, and we just love the view. When will we ever get a chance to live on the 10th floor anywhere? Probably never.
Here's a view of the neighborhood. It seems to have been a Victorian neighborhood, which still has many homes, and big trees, with apartments like ours on the fringe.
We walked around the neighborhood some more, looking at the old homes, and noticed a Victorian turned into a duplex condo; they were asking about $360K for it, which seemed like a good price. Then we drove over to Judy's place for dinner. She had made homemade salsa and cooked up some wonderful dishes for us, and we told her all about our day. We'll be close enough to ride our bikes over to visit her, once we're settled in.
Saturday, September 24
Today we waited around for the glass guy to repair the RV winshield (we caught a rock in Wyoming), and then started moving stuff into a U-Haul storage unit Mark found for us (we get it free for renting a U-Haul truck when we move from Sac.). It's a gorgeous sunny day here today. We got two carloads moved in, and we probably have another two to go. Boy we have a lot of stuff in this thing!
Sunday, September 24
Woke up this morning to discover that someone had stolen Mark's bike last night, with Katie's seat on it too. Mark's not too upset about it--he'll buy a new bike when we get back up here and settled in. We're both glad it happened at the end of the trip instead of sooner, as we've used our bikes a lot. He used it just hours before going to bed, to buy some ice for our cooler (the fridge still doesn't work).
Mark called his friend Terry, who had been house-sitting for us and is now living in Portland, and they arranged for us to have lunch at a pizza place in Terry's neighborhood. So, after Mark moved some more boxes into storage, we drove over and saw the neat, funky neighborhood called Mississippi. It's east of downtown, right across the river, and for generations it was the black side of town (blacks weren't even allowed to buy on the west side). Now it's a mixed, young community of mostly whites, and it's in the process of gentrifying--there are cute little shops and restaurants, like the pizza place we ate at, which had great pizza:
Here's Terry with Katie and Mark:
But still some crack users living in the old Victorians. In fact, the house Terry bought was owned by a slumlord who was renting it to some crackheads. It's a duplex, built in 1894, and needs a lot of work, so Terry got a really good deal on it. He and his daughter are fixing it up, and then they'll live in it. Here are a couple pictures:
His apartment will be the upper one, that you see here. Below is another one for his daughter. They also have a good sized yard and an old garage that Terry will convert into an art studio for himself. It sounds great, and we've offered to help him so we can learn some stuff too.
Monday, September 25
Mark drove over to OMSI on the east side of the river, parked the car and ran across a bridge to downtown, ran along the river and through downtown this morning, then took another load to the storage unit. We packed up our last load when he got back and took it down. Here is a picture showing how much stuff we've got in this unit already (I can't believe we had so much in the RV--and Martha's still not empty; we've kept the stuff we'll need for the next two weeks).
In the afternoon, we headed over to the DMV to get a trip permit for our car, since our plates expired last month on the trip (and it would have to be smogged in CA before we could re-register). This little $20 permit will appease the cops up here, and when we hit the CA border, we'll just have to drive really carefully to and from Sacramento. The amazing part was how easy it was to get the Oregon DMV on the phone, (no wait at all to chat with a real person), and when we got there, we were seen within ten minutes.
After the DMV, we took Katie over to Washington Park, a really huge urban park in the hills west of downtown. Part of it is only five blocks from our new apartment, but the playground is too far away to walk to. Here it is:
Then we found a Baja Fresh next to Powell's Books (a huge local bookstore that sells new and used books, and takes up a whole block), so we ate and looked at books, then came back here.
Tuesday, September 26
Today we leave for California. We might camp at Mt. Shasta, just south of the Oregon border, but we'll go as far as we can today, to make tomorrow easier.