On our last day and night in Portland, we moved over to McMenamin’s Crystal Hotel in downtown Portland, just a block away from Powell’s City of Books. We Ubered over for the second time with a driver with a Tesla…that was fun! It was a beautiful car and the window on top went all the way back.
If you’ve followed me very long, you know that the Crystal is one of my favorite places. We dropped off our luggage at 11:30 a.m. and spent the next three and a half hours at Powell’s. How I would love to work there, but I’d probably spend more than I made. We did not check luggage on this trip so I had to keep my book buying impulses under control.
I’ve been trying to purge my book collection, but the urge to collect books by certain authors is still very strong. One of my holy grails has been a hard cover copy of The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, so I went straight to those shelves. Yes, they had it! It’s been so long since I read it it will be like reading it for the first time again. They had another hard cover of hers that I don’t have, but I was good and didn’t buy it.
The other three, well, come on. Textile Landscape had been on my list a while since I love Cas Holmes, so I bought it new. Plus I just adore the feel of a Batsford book. At least there was no shipping or sales tax! Mixed Media Books by Gabe Cyr has interesting ideas about what a book is and can be. Lark Books never let me down – there was a time when any book they published would tempt me, no matter what the subject. I’m sad that they’re out of business. Metal Craft Discovery Workshop is a basic metal working book by Linda and Opie O’Brien, and since I’ve been playing more and more with metal and adhering things to metal, it will be useful.
We walked back to The Crystal and checked in to our rooms. I got the Lionel Hampton room, which delighted me because I used to play mallet percussion in our high school band.
We ate lasagna for dinner at the Zeus Cafe outside where the street has been blocked off. Then we changed into swimsuits and enjoyed the salt water soaking pool in the basement, then we slept well and the next day, we were flying home.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2bTJwEcJBc]
slowly she turned 