Cartopia

All that hiking at Mount Tabor and horsing around on the monkey bars and see saws made us hungry.

No, we did not go to Burgerville (this is the Hawthorne location) although we did go here three years ago.

Back in 2009, I vaguely remember seeing the Potato Champion cart. It was the only one (or maybe one of two or three) that was there. It stood out to me because it had trees, mountains, and a squirrel painted on it.

I thought this flyer was funny, the "Geek Olympathon"! That should be interesting. Seeing all of these wooden telephone poles plastered with flyers reminded me of a sketch in "Portlandia" where unseen people are angrily stapling over each other's flyers.

That episode was called "Flyer Wars"...

Cartlandia

The other night when we were with KDB, we passed by this food pod, located on SE 82nd.  We made a mental note to check it out...

It was a Sunday and we learned that most food carts and food pods aren't really open, but we wanted to try our luck...

Mt. Tabor Park

After reading about this city park and knowing that Mount Tabor was once an extinct cinder cone volcano within city limits (there are only two other places like this in the U.S. and the other location was also in Oregon). We knew we had to go here...

We parked at the Yamhill entrance. There are several ways to get up to the park.

Ooh, look at that address! The number of the Beast (with an extra 6)...Cue the music from "Carmina Burana" here!

An Xuyen Bakery

Our day was going by pretty quickly. After enjoying our awesome Vietnamese soups at Ha &VL and then jamming our asses over to catch the earliest show of "The Hunger Games", we decided to get a quick snack before going to a local park...

I read about this place prior to our trip so I wanted to make sure we made a quick stop...

A movie and signs from the SE

It was cool watching "The Hunger Games" during it's first weekend (it would remain the #1 movie for four straight weeks)...

We saw it a few blocks away, also on SE 82nd at the Century Eastport Mall.

I won't get into a full on movie review here, but we all felt the movie was a pretty good adaptation of the book. Great costumes in the Capitol. Lenny Kravitz in gold eyeliner. Interviewer Caesar Flickerman and so on.  The violence of course, was toned down. This was a PG-13 movie after all. I still think they could have made Peeta's unrequited love for Katniss more convincing. Because of that, their chemistry was lacking. I wasn't too keen on the hand held camera work.  It was too shaky for my tastes and too "Blair Witch". Bring some dramamine. About the movie previews, I can't wait to see the film version of the book I'm trying to finish, "Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter"! It looks so bad ass! Plus it's produced (not directed though) by Tim Burton! Bert of course, was salivating over the upcoming "The Avengers" and TC found the trailer for "ParaNorman" quite funny (can't wait to see that as well)!

Team Katniss!

Day 2 - Ha & VL

Aah, our second day in PDX and we were greeted with the gray skies and drizzle.

We made sure to get up early to we could get some soup before they ran out...