Portland

Portland is a green river city under the Cascade Range, with the volcano of Mount Hood National Forest standing on the eastern skyline. They call it the City of Roses: the International Rose Test Garden has been raising thousands of them on a hillside since 1917, and the Portland Japanese Garden is one of the finest outside Japan. The best-known bookshop in town fills an entire city block and calls itself the largest independent bookstore in the world, new and used shelved side by side. Coffee is roasted on the premises here, beer is brewed around the corner, and food carts gather by the dozen on a single lot. Forest Park unrolls tens of kilometres of wooded trails inside the city limits. An hour east, the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area cuts a green trench a hundred kilometres long, where Multnomah Falls drops more than a hundred and eighty metres in two leaps beneath a small stone footbridge.