Yes Virginia, There is a Tasmanian Devil

We had a great day today.

We. I'm having a hard time coming up with a blog nickname for the other half of "we." Craig has set the bar too high with "The Scientist." I can't just call her "The Sales Chick." And "J" doesn't work for college-related reasons. I guess for now she'll just have to be, "The Fiancée."

Anyway.

We're in Portland, Oregon on our way to Seattle. For a change, neither of us is going to attend any family-related gatherings this Thanksgiving so we decided to have a little vacation. We took the whole week off and are going to stay at what will hopefully be a really cool spa resort outside of Seattle (more on that later, after we've actually been there). A friend of TF (let's call her N) lives here so we figured it would be nice to visit with her and her husband and get a local to show us around town.

After brunch at Mother's we headed out into "the gorge" to check out a bunch of waterfalls. Unfortunately, between the weather and a landslide or two, we didn't get to see a whole lot:


Next was a trip to the famous Powell's Books. Pretty cool, but overall I was more impressed with the little used bookshop down the street from Mother's. Then we went to check out a very cool, very Portland kinda place. It's called Kennedy School and it's basically a hotel and some restaurants. The cool part is that it used to be an elementary school until 1975.


That's right, the schoolrooms are hotel rooms, the assembly room is a movie theater, and (the best one) the detention hall is a bar. If we hadn't already found a cool little hotel downtown we would have tried to stay there. N said there's a movement around town called Keep Portland Weird. Very appropriate.
We then tried to buy some local wine but I don't think we were in quite the right place. This place was more Quik Stop than Beltramo's. After a quick tour of the local adult bookstores we headed over to N's house.

There we met a couple of real cuties that we wouldn't have minded taking home with us:


Thurgood. Yes, after the judge he resembles.


And Jinx.

Finally, we hit Papa Haydn's for dinner. Fantastic. Tons of food, great wine, and a dessert menu that kicks the ass of any other dessert menu I've ever seen.

All in all, a great day. Of course, if you can't have fun hanging out all day with 2 hot chicks and meeting a couple of cool four-legged friends then you aren't trying very hard. Oh, D you were cool too.