Portland Arrival

Dad and I meet at PDX to get things going. We start with Huber's Café in downtown Portland, which dates to 1879, then take a Segway tour through Portland and along the Willamette River. Then it’s off to Longview, Washington for our first ballgame.

I kicked off our latest odyssey by making the easy and scenic flight from San Jose to Portland — admiring the string of handsome Cascade volcanoes, most still clinging to their last patches of snow in the middle of June. This would be my third big baseball road trip in four years. In 2020, COVID-19 shut down a planned trip with my Dad to see all nine Minor League ballparks in the region. Months later, two of those teams — the Boise Hawks and Salem-Keizer Volcanoes — lost Minor League affiliation during a system-wide contraction.

In 2021, the distances between the remaining ballparks, the new six-game homestands that keep teams in one place for an entire week, and the closure of the Canadian border made the Northwest a less-attractive option. In Dad and I decided to head to the Carolinas, where there was a more densely populated selection of Minor League ballparks within easy driving distance. We visited 15 of them — plus an independent Atlantic League park — in just 19 days. As Dad likes to say, we both had a blast.

We decided to give the Northwest another go in 2022, adding collegiate summer league ballparks and others to the schedule for a total of 17 games in 16 ballparks in 19 days. When I landed in Portland, we were off and running.

Huber's Cafe

We drove straight from PDX to downtown Portland for our first stop of the day, lunch at Huber's. This classy Portland institution was founded in 1879 and is famous for its roast turkey and Spanish coffee. Dad and I each had hot turkey sandwiches with gravy. A great start.

Portland Segway Tour

Our baseball road trips are as much about travel and sightseeing as they are about the baseball. The ballparks and games are good excuses to go places we might not otherwise see, and we make an effort in our limited time to understand what is unique or interesting about each destination.

For our canceled 2020 Northwest road trip, we had planned to begin with a Segway tour of downtown Portland, and we kept this on the schedule for 2022. But an awful lot had taken place in the Rose City in the interim. Protests over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020 spread to cities in all 50 states. In Portland, however, they evolved into a near-continuous series of protests that lasted several months and became the focus of divisive national attention. Battles between protestors, authorities, and other elements resulted in nearly 1,000 arrests and tens of millions of dollars in damage to local businesses.

By the time we arrived for our Segway tour, the city appeared to be getting back to normal -- or whatever normal is for a place whose unofficial slogan is "Keep Portland Weird." We gathered in the tiny Lovejoy Fountain Park before zipping off to various landmarks and parks in the downtown area. The sun poked through the gloom for a spell, warming office workers on their lunch breaks. The energy felt vibrant and positive, nothing like the eternal hellscape depicted by some.

*The* Portlandia statue sits atop the entryway to the Portland Building and is the second-largest copper repoussé statue (using hammers and punches from the inside-out to shape the statue) in the U.S., after the Statue of Liberty

We reached the long strip of shady greenery known as the South Park Blocks, which runs for about a dozen blocks from the center of downtown south to Portland State University. We then steered our Segways back toward the Willamette River, where we passed a few of the 12 bridges that span the waterway. (In addition to Rose City, Portland is also known as Bridgetown.) We, too, crossed the river on the Hawthorne Bridge to get a final look back at the city.

*The decommissioned USS Blueback submarine and the Marquam Bridge*

On to Longview

We left Portland and drove north in rush-hour traffic -- across the Washington border and along a tame stretch of the Columbia River -- to Longview, a city of just under 40,000. Longview was plotted out in the 1850s when a Missouri timber baron moved there, hiring 14,000 workers to run his two large mills. It is part of Cowlitz County and is home to the Cowlitz Indian Tribe.

We checked in to our hotel, then drove through downtown Longview to get to our first ballgame with the Cowlitz Black Bears. But before all of that, we had to stop and admire Longview's key attraction, the Nutty Narrows Squirrel Bridge.

Built by local contractor Amos Peters, the bridge provides safe passage for Longview's squirrel population and was the subject of significant national media attention following its construction in 1963. One can only imagine the power of the squirrel lobby in those days.

Acorny story, I know.

> NEXT: Cowlitz Black Bears