Oregon Trip Continued

Day 3 of the trip we hopped on the bus and headed to a bike rental place (or so we thought). We picked this particular rental place because it was closest to Forest Park, which is just out of the downtown area. Well we showed up and they said they don't rent bikes anymore! Darn it, that's what we get for not planning in advance. We had hoped to ride their mountain bikes through Forest Park so we just hiked instead.
Forest Park is a ginormous park! We probably only saw about 1/8th of it with our hike. There are millions of hiking, biking, and running trails throughout it and it is incredibly gorgeous! You feel like you are in a rain forest, the trees are just covered in moss and everything is green.

We were hiking along this creek for awhile and all of a sudden came across...

this random building (also covered in moss). It was was so cool!

As we were doing our hike through the forest, Ty was telling me about this other hike that he wanted to do that took you up to Pittock Mansion which had a great overlook of downtown Portland. I thought it sounded sweet so we were going to do it after we were done at Forest Park, but as we got to the top we ended up running into Pittock Mansion! We had been hiking that trail the whole time. Killed two birds with one stone (and I didn't mind not having to do another hike that day :) ).

It was a BEAUTIFUL mansion and, not to mention, I tried some yummy pepper jelly there.

After our lovely hike, we got back on the bus and decided to do a little more shopping. Luckily Tyler loves shopping just as me, especially when he finds Patagonia, Columbia, and Mountain Hardware all within a block of each other. Tyler heaven!

The next day we woke up to some rain! Finally, the Oregon weather we were expecting. We had wanted to go to the zoo and the Japanese Gardens that day and I am so glad we did not let the rain stop us. But, first things first, we had to hit up the famous Voodoo Doughnuts.

I had read about this place online, but I did not expect it to be so GOOD! They had millions of flavors of doughnuts and I wanted to try all of them. I limited myself to get two and that was enough of a sugar overload. I had to try their bacon maple doughnut, since I have been hearing enough about it in utah, and then I got a mango doughnut that had mango filling and some sort of tasty marshmallow, candy, sour topping on the doughnut. No idea what it was really, but it was good! Ty got a chocolate doughnut that had crushed oreos and peanut butter and other stuff all over it and then his mustache doughnut pictured below. I seriously wish we had this place in Salt Lake, it was so good!

Then we headed to the zoo and were pretty much the only people there, it was great! Ty and I were like little kids watching all the animals and being fascinated like we had never seen them before. This little black monkey was being a total show off with us and loved our attention.

This lady behind me in the picture really wanted us to pet her goats :)

We ended up spending like 3 and a half hours at this little zoo and had a blast but then ended up not having time to see the Japanese Gardens before they closed. Guess that's another reason for us to go back to Portland!

Our final stop of the day was the aerial tram. This tram is the only one in the US that is used for public transportation. It doesn't take you anywhere except for the hospital, but you can see all of Portland when you are on it. Well turns out it was $4 a person to ride that thing and the whole event probably lasted like 3 minutes. What can we say, I guess we're suckers for these kinds of things.