September 15, 2024

5 Things We Did in Portland

We recently travelled to Portland, Oregon in August. Here are 5 things we did while we were out there.

Back in August Jess and I travelled to Portland, Oregon yet again. I attempted to document this trip on video, but didn’t do a that great of a job explaining what we were doing on camera as we were doing it. Instead I decided to sum it all up through highlighting 5 overall themes of the trip.

Work Remote

We wanted to take a trip with minimal impact on our vacation days from work, so we decided to fly out on a weekend and work during the week. We’re fortunate to have jobs that allow us to work remotely, so we pretended like we like we lived and worked from Portland for a week.

We found a nice house in the Richmond area in SE Portland and stuck to working east coast hours, that meant waking up by 6:30am. The bright side was being done by 3:30pm and being able to hang out around town late afternoon into the evening.

It’s fun to try and work from another city every now and then to break out of your monotonous routines. We did this about 2 years ago when we went to Chicago. We especially like trying it out in places that we think might be interesting places to live. When we were in Portland last year we had a great time and thought about what it might be like to live there.

Joined a group run, ran along the river

Portland is known to have a really active community and is well known for it’s running and cycling scenes. We found out from our friend, Eric, that the Deadstock Run Club was organizing a group run/walk with Nike Running while we were there. Both Jess and I joined him to check it out.

The community really came out because there was a ton of people. Nike was giving away shirts and bags. We lined up to see if we could grab some but ended up giving up on the line because the runs were starrting. I ended up running a total of 9 miles between running to the event from where we were staying and joining their 6-mile long run group. Jess joined the walk group and we ended around the same time.

It was nice to see the river at sunset and run together with the PDX run community.

Went to the Oregon Coast

Towards the end of the week we decided to both take a day off of work and rent a car to visit the Oregon Coast. Since we did Cannon Beach last time we decided this time to go bit farther south down the coast to Oswald State Park. There was a nice little hidden beach there called Short Sand Beach. Afterwards we got some sandwiches by the coast and checked out some view points. We then stopped by Hug Point to sit and relax for a bit before heading back into Portland.

Explored the food scene

Our house ended up being in a really popular area for food spots. We knew there would be a lot of interesting food options within walking distance so we decided to dine out for every meal.

A couple of the highlights were:

A vegan and gluten-free restaurant named Harlow. It was he first place we went to when we landed. I really enjoyed their mac and cheese. We also got take out from there for our work lunch later on in the week.
A breakfast cart named Sunrise Co. where they make homemade english muffins and also use them for their breakfast sandwiches. Their sausage, egg and cheese was so good. I wanted to go back but they sold out and were closed on Tuesdays.
An asian dive bar called Short Round. Had a lot of nice small sharable dishes and it had cool vibe.
Little Beast Brewing that served some good BBQ

We noticed that in Portland there were a lot of parking lots that were turned into food cart parks every few blocks. It’s nice to have a lot of different options, although it did seem to get expensive.

Went to XOXO Festival

Lastly, the whole reason why we flew out to Portland was to attend XOXO festival. XOXO has been an event that’s been around since 2012. They had taken a break for the past few years, due to the pandemic, but Andy Baio and Andy McMillan decided to bring it back for one last year. XOXO has always been transformative in the trajectory of my career. I wanted to share the experience with Jess.

This year the event went back to its roots. I didn’t capture much while we were there but the highlight of it was being able to meet some new friends. Shout out to Jahan and Boyuan, who we noticed because they were wearing pieces from our friend, Nyla Hasan’s brand called The Other. We had many great conversations. A few of the talks for the conference portion of XOXO were also really moving.

XOXO always inspires me to pursue any weird creative ideas I’ve been thinking about but haven’t taken action on yet.