A popular bumper sticker—“Keep Portland Weird”—says a lot not only about Oregon’s largest city, but about the state as a whole. Oregon takes pride in being fiercely independent and sometimes more than a little quirky. It’s a frame of mind that has led to a rich assortment of attractions and experiences for visitors, groups included.
Oregon has proven to be fertile ground for people who want to do their own thing, whether it’s distilling sake, blowing glass beads, raising elk, selling artisanal chocolate, or restoring historic theaters. At the same time, the state is filled with rare natural features, ranging from fossil beds and volcanic moonscapes to sea lion colonies and vast sand dunes rivaling those of the Sahara Desert.
For planners, all of this means the chance to create a meetings program filled with memorable events and experiences that could only happen in Oregon.
Portland
Even after just a few minutes in Portland, it’s hard not to be aware of the youthful, creative energy that pulsates through the city. Portland, affordable in comparison to Seattle and San Francisco, is a magnet for young chefs, artists, designers, and other entrepreneurial types who are opening galleries, boutiques, studios, and restaurants everywhere from the downtown Pearl District to such up-and-coming neighborhoods as Alberta, North Mississippi and Hawthorne.
“Portland is a really supportive place for entrepreneurs. In particular, there are a lot of women designers here,” says Blake Van Roekel, owner of Magma Jewels, who creates jewelry made from hand-crafted glass beads and metalwork in a tiny downtown studio and showroom.
Van Roekel offers workshops for small groups that can spend a couple of hours in her showroom learning the art of crafting exquisite beads with the aid of a blow torch and small kiln. The artist will also travel to venues to do bead-making demonstrations.
The work of many other artists in the burgeoning local scene can be enjoyed at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, which moved to a larger location in downtown Portland last summer. The new space includes The Lab, a room available for specially arranged craft demonstrations, receptions and other special events.
“The Museum of Contemporary Craft is a great place to hold an event,” says David Schargel, president of Hometown Advantage, a local DMC, and Portland Walking Tours. “When you walk through the museum, there’s always something going on with the artists.”
Another good overview of the arts scene is provided by the First Thursday Gallery Walk, held in the Pearl District on the first Thursday evening of every month. Participants can wander through dozens of galleries that feature everything from art glass to sculpture and multimedia.
Among the galleries available for events is Lawrence Gallery, which can accommodate up to 400 people for a reception and also features movable walls that can create spaces for private dinners. The gallery also offers a fireside wine bar and a wine cellar available for small dinners and receptions.
A case could be made that some of Portland’s most creative newcomers are chefs and restaurateurs. Dozens of innovative new restaurants, many drawing on Oregon’s outstanding seafood and agricultural products, open in the city each year. Among the most acclaimed are Tabla Mediterranean Bistro, which offers a wine cellar as a private dining room, and Bluehour, located in a Pearl District warehouse and focusing on local ingredients like line-caught salmon and organic Oregon berries.
“When I came to Portland 13 years ago, this was the land of all-you-can-eat buffets, but everything has completely changed,” says chef Vitaly Paley, owner of Paley’s Place, a popular small restaurant in the city. “A handful of chefs, most of us from other places, banded together to promote regional cuisine and to work with local farmers to supply us with wonderful ingredients, even truffles. Now we’re seeing a whole new generation of young chefs coming up, a lot of them from Portland.”
Paley is one of several local chefs who participate in cooking exhibitions and classes at downtown Portland’s In Good Taste Cooking School, which offers a state-of-the-art exhibition kitchen and a store stocked with Oregon wines, cookware and gourmet food items. A popular venue for cooking demonstrations and receptions, In Good Taste has space for up to 30 people seated and up to 60 standing.
Portland’s edible side can also be appreciated in its innumerable small specialty confectionaries and bakeries. One of the most unusual is Voodoo Doughnut, known for everything from the Memphis Mafia, an enormous glazed doughnut filled with peanut butter, banana and chocolate chips, to its signature Voodoo, a doll-shaped doughnut with raspberry “blood” filling and a tiny pretzel stuck into its heart.
Another example of Portland’s entrepreneurial innovation is Cacao, a shop whose two young owners, Aubrey Lindley and Jesse Manis, are on a mission to educate the public about artisanal chocolate from around the world.
“We felt there needed to be a venue for appreciating the complexity of chocolate,” Manis says. “We want people to be able to compare the various types of chocolate and chocolate beans.”
Along with dozens of gourmet chocolate bars, Cacao is stocked with all things pertaining to chocolate, including chocolate perfume and cookbooks.
Store customers are able to sample any of the myriad types of chocolate, comparing the flavor of chocolate produced by beans from Venezuela, Madagascar, Indonesia, and other places.
Behind a long marble bar, Cacao is adorned with two espresso-type machines that produce various kinds of drinking chocolate, a much thicker and richer version of the usual hot chocolate beverage. Tastings of the various kinds of drinking chocolate, ranging from bitter to sweet to spicy, can be enjoyed at cafe tables at the front of the store.
Chocolate and drinking chocolate tastings can be customized for groups.
“We’ve even done pairings of different types of wine and chocolate together,” Manis says.
Some of the city’s most intriguing venues owe a lot to the fact that, unlike a lot of cities, Portland has not lost most of its older buildings to the wrecker’s ball. Instead, many have been converted to new uses, including a former downtown dry cleaners, which is now simply known as The Cleaners and serves as a venue for art exhibitions, receptions and other special events.
“People really like The Cleaners because it has a slightly funky feel and lots of old charm—high ceilings and big windows,” says Tara Thomas, an event planner with Explore Portland, a local DMC.
The Cleaners is operated by the adjacent Ace Hotel, a new boutique property that reflects the youthful, quirky feel of downtown Portland. An instant hit with guests involved in the local music scene, the Ace features guest rooms, no two of which are alike, appointed with long desks made from salvaged timber, recycled military furniture, vinyl records and turntables, and cast-iron baths and sinks from the hotel’s 1912 origins.
Thanks to preservation efforts, Portland boasts a number of elegant movie palaces and ballrooms dating from the days of silent films and swing bands. Several of these venues are operated by brothers Brian and Mike McMenamins, pioneers in both Northwest beer brewing and the preservation of some of Oregon’s most distinctive buildings.
Among them is the Crystal Ballroom, which for over 80 years has been known for its “floating” suspended dance floor that seems to bounce with the music. The 7,200-square-foot ballroom, with its corner stage, swooping balcony, food and beverage bars, and on-site brewery, is a popular spot for catered events with live entertainment.
Another McMenamins’ venue is the Bagdad Theater, a circa-1927 ornate movie palace where half the rows have been removed to allow for tables where patrons can enjoy beer and pizza while watching films. The 590-seat theater is available for private parties and multimedia presentations. For smaller groups, the Bagdad’s newly created Backstage Bar offers pool tables and seating for up to 50 people.
Willamette Valley
When Hometown Advantage’s Schargel wants to give groups a taste of rural Oregon, one of the places he heads for is Rosse Posse Acres, a 52-acre working elk ranch in Molalla, about 45 miles from Portland.
“You can tour the ranch and see these magnificent beasts roaming the fields—it’s a truly wonderful experience,” he says. “There’s also a farmhouse on-site, which is available for dinners.”
Another of his favorite Willamette Valley venues is SakeOne, the only American-owned sake distillery in the world, which offers tours and tastings of sake and sake cocktails at its headquarters in Forest Grove. An expansive deck and garden area are available for private events.
For groups meeting in Portland or the upper Willamette Valley, Tara Thomas at Explore Portland likes to use the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville for dinners or receptions. The museum’s oddest and most famous exhibit is the Spruce Goose, an enormous wooden “flying boat” designed by eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes during World War II for transporting equipment and troops. It made only one brief flight.
Coastal Oregon
Abundant marine life and stunning natural beauty are the hallmarks of Oregon’s dramatic coastline. A great introduction to this unique environment is provided in Newport by the Oregon Coast Aquarium, which has exhibits devoted to the marine life and sea birds of the coast. Designed with pools and rocky outcroppings, the museum is home to endangered sea otters, sea lions and unusual species such as the cuttlefish, which has the ability to change color, and the flashlight fish, named for its glowing eyes.
The aquarium’s Passage of the Deep exhibit, a series of acrylic tunnels where marine life swims overhead and to the sides, can serve as an evening event space for dinners and receptions.
A place to observe marine creatures in the wild, the Sea Lion Caves just north of Florence encompasses what is documented in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest sea cave. After making a descent by steps and elevator, visitors can explore the caves with its colony of Stellar sea lions, usually numbering over 200.
Wind-sculpted sand dunes, some towering to 500 feet above sea level, are the focus of the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area in Winchester Bay. Outfitters such as Sandland Adventures offer group tours in giant dune buggies that climb and descend over eight miles of the massive dunes.
Central Oregon
It may be reflective of Oregon’s quirky nature that the farther east one travels in the state, the more “Western” the landscape becomes. Heading east of the Cascade mountain range, the climate grows drier and the terrain more rugged, very much in keeping with the cowboy and pioneer images of the Old West.
The natural environment and history of central Oregon is the focus of one of the state’s most renowned attractions, the High Desert Museum in Bend. Set on 135 forested acres, pathways wind past exhibits such as an 1880 homestead ranch with costumed interpreters, a river otter habitat and a birds of prey center featuring owls and bald eagles.
The museum offers a variety of atmospheric venues, including the Schnitzer Entrance Hall, a space with soaring aspen-filled atriums, glass-enclosed habitats for a lynx and bobcat, skylights, and adornments such as a Western stagecoach and bronze sculptures. Another is the Hall of Plateau Indians, a Native American gallery with an authentic tule reed shelter.
Central Oregon is also a hotbed for geothermal activity, a geological fact that Cascade Destinations, a Bend-based DMC, highlights in its Volcano Tour for groups.
“The tours are led by a naturalist who not only talks about the geological features, but the Native American history of the area,” says Caron McCulloch, president of Cascade Destinations.
A great place to appreciate the Bend area’s steamy geology is the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, a massive, active volcanic caldera encompassing two alpine lakes, a waterfall and the nation’s largest obsidian lava flow. Cinder cones, a lava cave and exhibits at the Lava Lands Visitor Center are also part of the experience.
Located about 75 miles east of Bend, the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument is another of Oregon’s geological wonders. In this area of towering rock pillars and clay hills painted by nature in a dazzling assortment of colors, paleontologists work at uncovering a rich assortment of fossils, including four-toed horses, crocodilians and other creatures that roamed the area eons ago.
Eastern Oregon
No place in the state evokes its Old West past more than eastern Oregon, a region where visitors can attend an authentic rodeo, see wagon ruts from the Oregon Trail and even explore the remains of a 19th-century red light district.
In Baker, the story of the 2,000-mile trek made by tens of thousands of men, women and children is told at the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center. Jointly operated by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the Trail Tenders volunteer group, the center offers exhibits, living history performances, outdoor areas depicting a wagon encampment, and footpaths taking visitors to scenic overlooks and still-visible wagon ruts.
Since 1909 Pendleton has been the scene of the Pendleton Round-Up, an old-fashioned rodeo that takes place in mid-September (Sept. 6-13 this year), complete with a parade, cowboy breakfasts, a country music concert, dances, art shows, and a nightly pageant detailing the Native American and pioneer history of the area.
At any time of year, visitors can experience Pendleton’s Wild West past through Pendleton Underground Tours, 90-minute walking excursions of the city’s former red light district that take participants through underground tunnels constructed by Chinese laborers and to the sites of gambling dens, bordellos and speakeasies
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