2 Nights in Portland with Tweens, Portland, Oregon

In a bookstore in Portland, Oregon we spotted a book called This is Portland: The City You’ve Heard You Should Like. It pretty well summed up our experience in this Pacific Northwest city-of-the-moment.

We didn’t dislike Portland. We found things to do with kids and teens, and good, inexpensive places for families to eat. But as cities go it was too low-key for us. Tween Traveler said more than once that it didn’t feel like a city. I have to say that with all the beer, coffee and live music we might have had more fun on a couple getaway.

We stayed two nights and didn’t quite get to everything we wanted to do. Here are some fun things we found to do, some things we think you can skip, and things local friends highly recommend doing with tweens that we didn’t get to.

There is a concentration of independent and chain hotels downtown. We opted for the boutique Dossier Hotel for its location and the good price we found.

It’s the sort of hotel where the staff is more than friendly to kids, but they definitely don’t cater to families.

There is complimentary coffee and tea but no juice in the morning; at happy hour there is local beer and kombucha (which Tween Traveler adamantly eschewed). ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).