In Portland, the zen, and zany happily co-exist
By BETSA MARSH
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/27/07

Like a glacial breeze off Oregon's Mount Hood, Portland blows away the cobwebs of same-old travel.

Instead of dutifully slogging through museums, how about pulling up a chair at a sidewalk cafe, sipping chai or a microbrew and asking your server where he'd go? Or renting a bike and seeing how many neighborhoods you could breeze through before happy hour? And you have to love a city that embraces not one, but two, happy hours — from about 5 to 7 each evening and then a second-wind version from about 10 p.m. to midnight.
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There's so much to do in this city of dual happy hours that it's easy to stay up most of the night, fueled by hard-core Stumptown coffee and Voodoo Doughnuts' best seller, the Bacon Maple Bar. The circumstances are totally different, of course, but Elizabeth Wood, a pioneer on the Oregon Trail in 1851, summed up the whirlwind of a modern Portland trip.

"A lazy person," she wrote, "should never think of going to Oregon."