Laurelhurst and Joan of Arc

I don't spend a lot of time on the East side of Portland, so I have only recently started getting a sense of where things are in relation to each other. I have still always had certain places that I remembered that I liked.

One of those has always been the area around Greek Fest. So many cars end up needing to find somewhere to park that you end up all over the immediate neighborhood: first driving through it, desperately looking for a space, then walking to Holy Trinity, then walking back.

When I was getting ready to head to Greek Fest this year, it occurred to me to see if there was anything else to do in the area, and that included looking up the location of the famous Joan of Arc statue. She is just a few blocks away.

Joan of Arc is a World War I memorial residing in Coe Circle. I had read articles about her being there, and efforts to restore the gold leaf. It didn't seem right to me that she could be so near the church and I had never seen her before.

After walking along Glisan from the church, it makes more sense. The way the trees are, you don't really see the statue until you are right there.

The trees are part of that atmosphere in the neighborhood that I have always liked, but there is more to it than that.

It is an older neighborhood, with the land for the development first being purchased in 1909. That means the plots are bigger, so many of the houses are bigger, but many are built like cottages. There are gardens, and trees whose roots have crept out and buckled the sidewalks. I didn't feel right taking pictures of people's houses, so there are only pictures of the statue in her circle here, but in general the houses are gracious and charming.

Well, except for the one with all of the broken bird baths and faded lawn ornaments. I'm not sure what they're going for there.

Mountainside Lavender Farm

July is lavender season in Oregon, and many farms host festivals around the second weekend in July.

Festivals generally involve bringing in vendors and live music, which is the kind of thing that attracts a crowd. We went to check out Mountainside Lavender on July 5th, five days before the festival.

There are charming touches of purple scattered around.

Inside the store you can purchase various lavender products.

Mountainside has both French and English lavender planted in neat rows with labels at the end. You can take clippers into the field to select your own bunches of lavender, or just walk among the rows sniffing.

One thing we were not prepared for was the bees. I was not able to get a picture that really captured it, but they were everywhere.

In some gardening information I have, there was a long list of bees attracted to lavender. I think I saw them all. I guess the lavender honey needs to come from somewhere.

http://www.mountainsidelavender.com

http://oregonlavenderdestinations.com/

Pennsylvania and Minnesota Overview

It's normal after I finish the micro-blogging about a vacation that I think about what we should have done differently. The great thing about this trip is that the initial answer is not very much.

If I think harder I can come up with things. We would have skipped Hershey Park and instead gotten in the museum and the garden. We might have chosen a different hotel.

If we knew we were skipping Hershey Park - which after Labor Day is only open on weekends - that could have given us some more leeway for maybe spending more time in Philadelphia, which has a lot to see (probably too much for one trip). It would have been good to go into the Hard Rock Cafe in Philadelphia.

Those still all feel really minor. We had a great time. We saw a lot of different things and used our time well. This trip and the Chicago trip really stand out as having been planned well. It would be nice to think that means we are becoming better travelers, but I can rule out the possibility that it is simply that these are great cities where it is easy to get the advance information you need. Of course, we are still pretty good travelers.

That makes it hard to wonder when I am ever going to go on a vacation again. I have some local things to blog about, and maybe I can keep finding more of those, but I may run out of posts, and that will feel like its own loss, but not enough to distract from the greater loss of missing going somewhere. We will have to see.

For now there are a lot of great memories captured here, along with some not great photos that I still like a lot.

Mall of America - wrapping up

 

https://www.mallofamerica.com/

Over the course of many posts, the pictures that I really haven't used were from the displays around the Lego store. I don't think we even went in, but they were pretty cool.

And the mall itself was pretty cool. We had a good time.

I can't really give any advice for seeing it all - I think the best thing to do is not see it all. It is so vast, and there is so much, but a lot of it is just more mall. So if you have some priorities that you know you want to see, plan on those and check the maps for help in locating them, but otherwise just absorb. Wander and enjoy, and don't stress over it.

The other thing that is worth pointing out is that we had just come from Hershey, Pennsylvania, and Hershey's Chocolate World had an amazing bakery, but the cookies here are Nestlé Toll House Café and Great American Cookies were still good. That may be more of a testament to cookies in general, but while you're at the mall, you should have one.