Litha and I took a weekend off from purging the cabin and prepping our transition to spend the last weekend in April with Mike down in Portland. We all had a great time, though I think Mike paid dearly for it with time away from course work.
One of the big highlights was the Tin Shed, a great little restaurant in Portland that has an enclosed patio - using the term loosely, it is so much more than a patio - where diners can bring their dogs in with them for a bite. They had water bowls to bring back to the table for Fido and even had a couple things on the menu for man's best. Tables were spaced well enough that navigating between well-behaved dogs was no problem. Even better, the food was fabulous!
We had to wait quite a while outside for a dog-friendly table to open up, but it gave us a chance to put Litha's sidewalk manners to the test. We ended up parking several blocks away and walking to the restaurant (24' van + narrow streets = let's just walk a few blocks), so she'd had a little bit of a walk before she had to really behave. I could not have asked for better behavior from her. She didn't jump on, or lunge at, any person or dog and only reacted mildly when another young dog got into her face a bit. I continue to be a very proud dog mom.
The other highlight was a walk along the river next to the airport. It wasn't very crowded, we had plenty of space to walk, and Litha even got to try to chase and catch the little waves along the river. Fortunately, there were only a couple people that didn't have control of their dogs and we had enough space to notice and hang back to prevent any issues. There were some kite surfers along the river and Litha seemed really confused that she wasn't being sent out to retrieve those great big birds!
We thought we might try to take the lightrail downtown, but dogs have to be in an "enclosed carrier", so we thought we'd give a "K9 Sport Sack" a try. It's a smidge too small, but I think we might have been able to get away with it if we hadn't decided to walk along the river instead. I'm sure we'll get another chance to give it a try.
All in all, we had a great break in Portland. Given that it looks like there will be a lot of projects in Portland coming up, we might even get to see if they'll let us get away with the backpack!
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