Andrew and I went downtown and stood in line so that we could get a signed copy of a Bridges of Portland poster. The artist, Michael Bear, was very nice and happy to see such a large turnout. We grabbed lunch afterward at a Mexican place nearby. I totally felt as though I were cheating on Los Gorditos. The weather was beautiful and there were people everywhere. The Starlight Parade was later in the evening so there were already people camping out and groups of chairs taped off in order to reserve front row seating. We happened upon a store that we had walked past many times but it was always closed. This time it was open so we wandered around and found a pretty cool poster of the Portland neighborhoods. I guess we were in a map buying mood so we bought it. I figured it might tie in nicely with the bridges poster. Great! Now we had two posters that would need to be framed. I found a place in Vancouver that claimed to be affordable so made an appointment for the next day. We’ll see.

Andrew, Wayne, Natale and I headed down to the parade around 19:00 so we could get dinner first. We of course went to Los Gorditos and it was much better than our lunch choice. Some of the parade floats were staging outside of the restaurant so we got a bit of a preview while we ate. Roberto and Frankie met us for dinner and we went together to watch the parade. Eddie from Los Gorditos met us once he got off work but he ended up missing most of the parade. It was fun anyway although Andrew was so over walking and standing. He had run to Cathedral Park this morning and then we stood watching the parade for about 3 hours. He got in 30k steps for today.

Today I learned that this parade has been happening since the early 1900’s and this year the PDX carpet ‘PeeDee’, was the Grand Marshal. Oh Portland 🙂