Portland Day 4: Washington Park

Washington Park is a huge park adjacent to downtown Portland (uphill) that has miles and miles of hiking trails, a Children's Museum, the Oregon Zoo, the Portland Japanese Garden, a Forestry Discovery Museum, an International Rose Test Garden, an arboretum, an amphitheater, a railway, a children's park, and I'm sure some other stuff I don't know about.  We probably could have spent several days discovering this park, but we only had a few hours in between Jane's naps to see a few things.

We started at the Children's Museum.  There's a similar place here in Salt Lake, but Jane has never been before, and she absolutely LOVED it.  For the first time we weren't herding her around, telling her she couldn't touch things, or go places.  She could go anywhere!  And play with anything!  We could have spent the whole day there.  This is her with a little Jane-sized shopping cart:

After playing at the children's museum we took a bus to another part of the park where they have a lot of gardens.  We decided to go to the Japanese gardens, which was high enough to have a view of downtown Portland and Mt. Hood behind it.  (That's where we took the photo I put on the blog of me with Mt. Hood behind.)

The Japanese gardens were much bigger than the Chinese garden we had seen the day before and I don't think we saw even half of it.

Washington Park was the hardest day for us, mostly because there was just so much to do and not enough time.  Poor Jane slept for only a few minutes in the car on the way back to the hotel.  So once we got back we decided to take Jane to the pool for the first time ever!

Her swimsuit has ruffles!

Jane pretty much clung to Mommy the entire time, but she relaxed after awhile and thought Daddy was really funny when he went under the water and blew bubbles!  We went over to the hot tub and let Jane dangle her feet in the warm water, and she LOVED that.  Plus, the little curls on the back of her neck scrunched right up and everyone there thought she was adorable!  We already knew that, but the curls help. =)