Portland Spoke – The Official Blog of Travel Portland

After three days in Seattle for my daughter’s volleyball tournament last weekend, it was good to be home. But travel tournaments like these are also nice mini-vacations for our family.

When we travel, we prefer to stay at suite hotels. After the first day, we all need a little space. For friends with family visiting us in Portland, my recommendations are always the Embassy Suites Downtown, Residence Inn Portland Downtown - Riverplace, and Inn at Northrup Station.  (more…)

Sometimes, the winter weather in Portland can be a bit … dicey.  Fortunately for us, we have a great arts scene that provides some cozy distractions, from festivals (the Jazz Festival and the Portland International Film Festival are on right now) to season-long offerings from companies like the Oregon Ballet Theatre, Oregon Symphony and White Bird Dance.

Now through the end of March, downtown Portland’s performing arts organizations have teamed up to provide a break from the winter doldrums with a 2-for-1 offer on select performances.  Shows include STOMP, Alvin Ailey Dance, and a piece from Oregon writer Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  In addition, local restaurants and retailers are providing dining, shopping and parking discounts to showcase the full downtown Portland experience.

These deals are open to locals and visitors, so check out the details at downtownportland.org.

When I go to the Portland International Film Festival (Feb. 10-26), I choose which films to see in a different way than almost everyone else.  I don’t want to read the excerpts or the reviews. I don’t want to know what the film is about and I don’t want to hear anyone talk about it.  My favorite thing is to sit in the dark theater and wait for the movie to begin, my head a “tabula rasa.” How exciting to wait and see how the story unfolds. 

Of course I can do this because I have a Silver Screen Pass which lets me into everything in the VIP line. I am totally spoiled by this and I admit it. I do check out which country the film is from and I very cursorily look to see if it is perhaps too violent or depressing for me — I prefer good stories, human interest, comedies, relationships over war and murder and inhumanity. 

Every time I see a film on the big screen there is a frisson of excitement but PIFF provides 17 days of this exciting interaction.  I love the Portland audience. They are so into this festival. 

Year 34: 88 features, 42 shorts, 6 venues and a lot of surprises!

Neil Gomoluh and Barbara Berman, owners of NobaL home

Juggling kids at home and a full-time work schedule, I always seem to be in need of a place where I know I can find a gift for a friend or a card that says the perfect thing. Based on a recommendation, I popped into NobaL home in the Pearl District the other night and had to contain myself from not buying up more than I “needed” (a picture frame, birthday card, ladybug and monkey toothbrush holders and a candle). With reasonable prices on home décor, local art, cards, whimsical children’s items and more, this is my new go-to for gifts.

Owners Neil and Barbara started the business with a noble notion of focusing on recycled, re-found or local products. The “nobal” in NobaL home is a nod to their names, but also has started to come in handy as a store locator. The shop is tucked in between Pearl Bakery and Eleni’s Philoxenia, “North Of Burnside A Little.” With Burnside as the divide between the north and south quadrants of the city, it’s an easy method to remember how to find your way to NobaL home, 110 N.W. Ninth Ave., between Couch and Davis streets.

Fernando Viciconte

Growing up, my best friend Tim’s access to his older brother’s record collection — The Kinks, Clash, Bob Marley, early R.E.M. – was a godsend. The albums were a refuge for us, a couple of dorky contrarians [editor’s note: some things never change] trying to navigate the cheesy ’80s soundscape of our junior high and high school years.

Now, I can thank R.E.M. (or, to be more specific, guitarist Peter Buck) for riding to the rescue once again.

Buck helped coax Fernando Viciconte, one of my favorite singer/songwriters in Portland, out of retirement.

The happy result: a spirited CD release show at Dante’s on Feb. 5, for which Fernando assembled a crackerjack lineup, including Richmond Fontaine guitarist Dan Eccles and  multi-instrumentalist Lewi Longmire on organ.

Tour dates are planned, and the new record, “True Instigator,” takes its place alongside Fernando’s late-’90s chestnuts: the rootsy, foot-stomping fun of “Old Man Motel” and the bristling rock en Español of “Pacoima.”

If you have the chance, check him out live. Or, better yet, pass along the word to a friend’s kid brother.

For the last few months, we’ve been quietly busy at work on some major revisions to our primary website — www.travelportland.com. While our brand and design remain largely intact, the changes we’ve made are deeper and farther reaching than anything we’ve done in several years.

The focus for this work was three-fold:

• Improve site navigation and search. We implemented the recommendations of an extensive usability study to make it much easier for you, our users and customers, to find key information and content. As you will see when you visit the site, the main navigation, as well as sectional navigation throughout the site, has been revamped to really bring all the great content to the surface. Further, the site search has been significantly improved to bring you more relevant and deeper results (for example, partner business listings, PDF documents and more are now indexed and retrievable from the main search).
• Update all content. We didn’t just take the content we had and re-organize it to make it easier to find — we undertook a major effort to update all of our content to bring you the freshest information about our favorite city: Portland, Oregon.
• Implement new site management tools. While this is the least visible part of the undertaking, it will allow us to much more nimbly and continuously keep the site updated and to add more cool functionality to the site going forward.

As with any major site launch, there are still some corners to smooth out and some kinks to work on, but we hope you’ll take a moment to visit the site and let us know what you think. We’re pretty proud of the results of the effort, but in the end, we did this for you, our users. Stay tuned for more cool developments on www.travelportland.com now that we have the infrastructure in place to really push the envelope.