Portland Part 2 and the Worlds Best Running Track

Amazingly another of my friends had a conference in Portland during the time that we are staying in Eugene. So we decided to go up and meet Daphne for the evening, hopefully give her some respite from all the Physics geeks. It is strange to see our friends from back home when we are over here. You almost feel like you are back in the UK again. Just for a few hours anyway!

On our last trip to Portland (when we visited Lui around a month ago) we missed out on going to the Nike Campus in Beaverton. We had heard good things about it, apparently it has a wood-chipped trail around the perimeter and also a running track we had heard was worth visiting. We weren’t disappointed, Andrea just had to do an easy run in the afternoon and made the most of the trails and then had some drills and strides to do, which we did on the track. The track was fantastic and totally worthy of the hype. It is set to the edge of the campus and is surrounded by tall redwood trees which cross over into the centre of the track so as you are running around it you are unable to see the other side. We both reckon it is now our favourite running track in the whole world!!


Michael Johnson statue overlooking track


Nike Campus running track

In the evening we met up with Daphne at the convention centre in Portland and walked back to where she was staying to grab some food. We ended up eating below where Daphne was staying, which turned out to be a British style pub with traditional pub food options. They had live music and St Patricks Day celebrations going on. It was a pity that none of us were drinking! We stayed until around 9:30pm before taking the now boring interstate number 5 south to Eugene. That will likely be the last we see of that section of the road on this trip!