Portland Walk: Mt. Tabor Park & Hawthorne Blvd.

 

After meeting up with some friends for a brunch at SlappyCakes last weekend we did some exploring. We headed toward Hawthorne Blvd. Once we got there rather than just head home, we went east and ended up in Mt. Tabor Park. Apparently Mt. Tabor is a "volcanic cinder cone." (It's dormant, don't worry.) It also has city reservoirs, we were walking next to #5 & #6. (We saw #3 and #4 on our walk in Washington Park, on the west/downtown side of the Willamette River.)

Reservoir #1 is also at the top of Mt. tabor, but since it wasn't the clearest day we didn't quite make it up there. (We climbed about as many stairs as I could handle on a recently filled belly full of pancakes.) I'm sure we will go back for the views, but last weekend was still a very pretty misty/foggy day. I thought the design of the reservoir structures looked right at home on a day like that one. 

Hawthorne sort of bends and then stops and starts again at each side of the park, and this picture was taken right at the end of Hawthorne, before it bends. I'd like to take this picture again on a clear day, you can start to make out downtown buildings and the hills beyond in this one.

We also stopped in a really nice coffee shop near here, Albina Press. I so missed pacific northwest coffee shops while we lived in Chicago. So much space to hang out, art on the walls, good reasonably priced coffee, and of course the pacific northwest weather that goes so well with coffee. They are also a great place to discover music, I've found, and I used shazam on my phone to find out we were listening to Sleepy Sun, a band from San Francisco. Later at home I found a nice live video.

 

I considered stopping in one of the two yarn shops we passed on Hawthorne, Yarn Garden and Happy Knits, but I didn't really have any relevant excuse this week. (Even so it's hard to resist.) Instead we just enjoyed our walk, Hawthorne is an active street for most of the length we walked. We got stopped by a train with several cars from Canada before we could climb some stairs and get on the bridge to get home. It was really really loud, but kind of neat. I saw a few open boxcars we could've tried to jump into if we were so inclined. 

Also noted some interesting construction work going on downtown at 2nd and Jefferson, where they have ripped off a portion of the side of this building.:

 

I mapped our route once we got home and found out it was 6.66 miles. Now I'm not really superstitious, but I thought that was a little weird. If I had known, perhaps we could've walked around the block once to add a .01.