Everyone got to sleep in today and after a late breakfast at home we headed over to Hillsboro for our 12:45 reservation at Top Golf.
Tuesdays are half price, and you get the whole bay for a single price, regardless of the number of players. We had fun playing out our two hours and enjoying Top Golf’s great food and drink menu.
We noticed on the way in that there was a K1 Speed next door, so we decided to go off-schedule and put in a few laps. These things get up to 45 miles per hour and with just us and two other racers on the track we got an opportunity to really feel the need for speed.
Of course, the cars are all the same, so no matter how much I mashed down the accelerator or drove technically, I have at least 50 pounds on B3 and even more on the other two skinny drivers that were on the track with us. There was no way I was beating B3, which he enjoyed immensely, since I smoked him in golf all afternoon.
Battling rush hour traffic (though we were counter commuting east back into the city so there was nowhere near as much traffic as that heading west on 26) we headed into downtown Portland to visit Powell’s City of Books, the largest bookstore in the world with over 1 million volumes on site.
The books are spread over eight different colored rooms. We were there for maybe an hour, but there was no way to see everything.
When you have a map for your bookstore, you know it’s big.
I checked out the Pearl Room where the Information Security books were located and ended up buying one book.
I’ll definitely head back when I have more time, but we were all hungry and getting tired so we made our way the two blocks over to Ikimono Ramen a little 5-6 table restaurant tucked into what appears to be a very old building with fresh updates.
They’ve been in business now about two months.
Their whole deal is ramen, ramen…. and more ramen.
B3 and I ordered the Black Garlic Tonkatsu Shoyu Ramen which had a deep umami flavored broth which I loved.
Kay got the Shrimp Ramen.
We also got some appetizers of Pickled Cucumber …
…and Boneless Kaarage (A Japanese technique of using potato starch on marinated meat to make incredibly crispy but juicy fried chicken.)
Overall, a very successful concept and we enjoyed it, but I’m told there are even better Ramen joints in town, so looking forward to comparing them to this one.
That’s it for today. Tomorrow we head out along the Columbia River Gorge and around Mt Hood. Oh, and today was the last day of sunshine for at least the next 10 days it looks like so we’ll be dealing with the cold wet weather of Portland again starting tomorrow…. Stay tuned.