Delenda Est Carthago: Picture Day chronicles the beginning of our time in Portland

In September 1993 we arrived in Portland after our cross-country trip. We had little money, no job prospects, and no place to live. Excellent! We stayed at a campsite in Battleground, Washington, while we scoured the city looking for a place to live and a place to work. That's the problem - you can't get a job without an address, and you can't usually get an address without employment. We finally found a nice landlady who trusted that we would soon be gainfully employed and let us an apartment. That helped on the job front. I got a job as a mail courier, which was a pretty good job even though I had to use my own car, which I soon totaled. The next car I bought I beat to hell, and it was a lemon anyway. So that wasn't fun. But the job was kind of cool - I met a lot of neat people, learned the area very well, saw a lot of the area, and didn't have a boss looming over me all the time. Krys, meanwhile, worked for a temp agency for a while before she got into the mortgage business, from which she is still trying to escape.

We did a lot of exploring in those heady days. We had a television but no cable, and we had very little furniture, and our apartment was wee, so there wasn't much point in staying indoors. I wouldn't give up my amenities for anything, but it was fun living like that for a few months. So we wandered around town, and I took pictures. You will see why I love the city:

This first picture is of part of downtown taken from the waterfront park. In the 1970s the City ripped out the freeway that ran along the west side of the river and moved it to the Eastside to make room for the park. The people on the eastern shore weren't terribly happy, but it's just one of those amazing, progressive things that Portland once did. Can you imagine a city moving a freeway to build a park? Anyway, that's the KOIN tower looming in the background, where a few years later, while I was working not far away, some guy went into the lobby and took a bunch of people hostages. In the foreground is the World Trade Center. I'm serious. The terrorists can't keep us down!

This is a picture of a lamppost. Ooooo! We were wandering around the old part of town, right near the river on the west side, and I thought this lamppost - at the corner of Southwest First Avenue and Ankeny Street - was neat. As you may have guessed, I'm a sucker for olde-timey-type stuff.

Along First Avenue are a lot of old buildings. This one houses part of the Saturday Market, a long-standing Portland weekend tradition. There was once an advertising museum inside, but it moved. We visited it - it's pretty cool.

Just outside of downtown is the Rose Test Garden, where they grow roses. I know, shocking. It offers very nice views of downtown, including this one:

The tall building in the middle is one of the two tallest buildings in Oregon. It's known locally as the Big Pink because, well, it's pink. It has nice, fast elevators, too. And a restaurant used to exist at the top, but it closed. We ate there once. Pretty good food, excellent view.

Here's another view of the city from the Rose Garden. The building on the extreme right is the other tallest building in Portland