Epic Road Trip part 2: Oregon Food Adventure

My boyfriend and I had a lot of fun driving through Oregon last month (well, despite all the snow & rain). It was actually my first time in OR, & so while I've heard a lot about the state... how green and pretty the west side is, and about the really cool "hippie culture", I was excited to see it for myself. We stayed in Portland for a night, and since we had such little time we wanted to see something or go somewhere we couldn't usually go.

 Luckily, one of Trevor's best friends lives in Vancouver WA (15 minutes from Portland) and knew just the place to go: Mcmenamins, which is a very popular pub-restaurant chain around Portland. He actually took us to the one in Vancouver, located right on the Columbia river. We got a delicious hummus plate and drinks (we love hummus and this plate had like 4 or 5 different hummus flavors to try, plus veggies, marinated olives & of course pita bread). If you're ever in the Portland/Vancouver area, check it out! 

We tried to convince Josiah (Trevor's friend) that he realllyyy needed to move down to Florida with us, because you know, FL's awesome, but he said he was having wayyy to much fun in Portland/ Vancouver and was not planning on leaving anytime soon. Wahh! We actually wanted to live in WA too and hearing him talk about how awesome it was didn't help. Maybe in the future :) 

The next day we got back in the U-haul to start the long drive again. I promise you I saw the biggest snow flakes of my life that day in Portland. It snowed sooooo much. I was nervous but glad that Trevor was so used to that kind of weather and driving. Before heading south on the 5, we drove downtown (kind of a challenge in a U-haul) to try to visit the famous Voodoo Doughnut. Fail! We tried to park and they said the U-haul was too big, even though we said we'd pay for 2 spaces. I was so sad! Luckily I found out they had another location in Eugene, so we planned to stop there. 

The scenery throughout the state was so beautiful. Snowy christmas trees! That part of the long drive went the quickest for me, because I was enjoying just looking out the window. 

We finally got to Eugene to go to Voodoo Doughnut , which I first heard of on the Travel Channel while watching Anthony Bourdain ( love that show). This place is known for their unusual doughnuts, and is honestly a pretty weird place. One of their most famous is a bacon- maple doughnut. They also have rice crispy, captain crunch and even a doughnut in the shape of a voodoo doll. I decided to go with a Portland Cream doughnut and could only eat half of it since it was so big. Trevor got the rice crispy flavored one and loved it. They had a really creepy background audiobook playing in the shop.. it was basically a chapter of a horror novel being read by a girl with a french accent. Pretty weird! Good experience though. 

After eating half of our doughnuts, we decided that maybe we should just go ahead and eat lunch while we were in Eugene. So we walked back outside in the snow and found a really different, deliciously healthy place called Bon Mi, which is a Vietnamese French cafe. What is cool is that in one of my previous blog entries, I actually made a bahn mi sandwich, so go check out that recipe. It even includes nutrition information  :) I decided to get the grilled tofu lemongrass bahn mi,  similar to the one I made in the blog, and Trevor got the marinated chicken bahn mi. I loved all the veggies that were on it. I felt like I needed to eat something healthy after that doughnut and this was perfect!

The top and right pictures are in Voodoo Doughnut, and in the bottom left you can see the veggie-ful bahn mis. After we were done eating, we knew we had a long drive ahead of us. We wanted to make it to Sacramento before stopping for the night.