First off, admittedly it's pretty lame that my new Silicon Valley blog is starting out with lots of non-Silicon Valley content. Unfortunately the Wordpress site I was using went down, and I plan on just leaving Godaddy all together. So here I am with a not very well populated Blogger site that claims to concentrate on Silicon Valley but starts out with Los Angeles and Portland?!



And I also have to admit....it never snowed in our short visit to Portland. In fact the weather was a bit warm and humid for my taste most of the time. But one photographic thing I've been playing with is an infrared converted camera. And Portland's lush greens go white, looking almost like snow!



The purpose of my trip to Portland was first to let my daughter visit a couple of colleges, and second to visit my photographer friend Tom Paiva, and his wife Lee (Tom is known for his night and industrial photography.) It so happens Tom lives literally one block from Reed College, one of the colleges my daughter was visiting.



We did manage to visit a couple of the touristy spots. Lee suggested a hip neighborhood, Hawthorne, where we visited a few shops.



And Lee also had a pass we used for a very short visit to the Rhododendron Garden.



Later I met up with Ella's friend and her mom and visited two gardens... first the Rose Garden.



And right next door was the Japanese Garden.



Of course no visit to Portland is complete without a visit to Powell's Bookstore!