Dining: Noodles

Not to be confused with the larger chain “Noodles and Company,” Noodles is a very small stand alone restaurant located in Beaverton, off Beaverton Hillsdale Highway. The restaurant, as the name implies, specializes in...well...noodles. The restaurant serves a wide variety of homemade pasta dishes, salads, desserts as well as simpler traditional dishes like mac and cheese for kids. 

Noodles is small but popular, so crowds are not uncommon. There is seating for about thirty people, but more than that might pass through the restaurant during the average meal time. Sometimes there is a long wait for seating and it may be more practical to take the food to go. But certainly take the food: Noodles is very high quality. For those who like to stick with what they know, available pastas include traditional dishes such as Beef Stroganoff and Mac N’ Cheese. For people who are a bit more adventurous, Noodles also features seafood dishes, chicken, and sauce styles ranging from Latin America to the Mediterranean. The dishes are affordable, generally ranging from five to ten dollars, but if that seems too low, they have an array of beers and bottled sodas to drink. The service is good: food is ordered at the counter and then brought to the table. In Southwest Portland? In the mood for pasta? Give noodles a try! -KP

Pricing: $5-15   -   Service: Good    -     Formality: Casual  -   Rating: A

Address: 6830 SW Beaverton Hillsdale Hwy   Website: noodlesportland.com

Portland's Holiday Express: A Winter Tradition

Steam trains, while a staple of childhood stories, are unusual in the twenty-first century. Though many survived being scrapped, and several are still operating, opportunities to ride them are few and far between, in the Portland area at least. To ride behind one, one needs to know the perfect place and time. Long trips out of Portland on a high speed steam train are rare and cost a few hundred dollars, but there is another, far cheaper steam train you can ride on during the holidays. And it runs several times every year for less than $50.

The Holiday Express is one of our holiday traditions. The trips occur over four weekends in December, by the Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation. Before the first trip, the train set is moved from its base near OMSI to Oak's Park to begin the season. It’s hard not to notice a three-story steam plume where once there was one, and it’s fairly well advertised. Still, it seems to be little known among my friends and coworkers. This is a bit of a shame. Living with a volunteer at the organization, I have ridden it many times, but this is a piece of holiday magic that deserves a bit more attention than it gets.

#4449 rests between trips in 2015. The cab window is open allowing a glimpse at some of the locomotive's controls. -M. Kramer, photo.

For train fanatics, this train stands out as a rarity. The locomotive, Southern Pacific #4449 is a rare GS-4 type. While it was once a popular model, all but this one were scrapped and today it is one of a kind, a fact well known among train fans. The coaches it pulls date back to the 50s, and all are steam heated. Many of these, including the round-ended rear car are also rarities. It’s clear that some people are there for the locomotive. Train fans are sometimes referred to as foamer due to their almost rabid obsession with railroading. These are fairly easy to spot. But one doesn’t need to be an expert in railroad history to appreciate the Holiday Express. 

Despite the short run time and low speed, the trips are no less magical. Tickets are affordable, and trains generally leave every hour, allowing for a layover between forty-five minute trips. From the covered tent in the Oak's park parking lot, all of the passengers walk up to the train in the brisk, but relatively mild northwest winters, with a cool wind blowing on the face. As with classical trains, wisps of steam stream up from the tracks, producing white misty clouds. The steam carries with it a mineral-like scent which is pleasant and nostalgic and lingers in the entire trains set, bringing with it mental images of the classical age of passenger trains. An age that I, alas, never knew, but that’s one of the points of keeping these machines active. It’s all that is left of a bygone era of train travel.

A video of the Holiday Express during the day as seen from the window at the end of one of the cars. -Staff Photographer

Outside, when the train begins to move, the locomotive shoots out a blinding cloud of steam covering the bike path. This is enough to clue many observers in. Some step out of the way entirely, while others step back yet close enough to get a face full of steam. Overly-enthusiastic ones are told to keep clear in order to not get burned. Like I said, train nuts are called foamers for a reason.

Inside, the train’s motion is harder to register at first. Due to its slow speed and peculiar route, it only goes about half a mile before stopping, then the locomotive pushes the train a mile back to the other end of the railroad, then back to Oak's Park for the next run. Once it gets moving however, the coaches rock pleasantly to the rhythm of the ancient rails. The ride is largely a social activity. Families will come, parents, children both grown and young, extended family, and friends. The passengers group together and talk amongst themselves. In addition to the joy of the ride, Children tend to squeal with delight when they discover that Santa is on board as well. This is great for kids, but is a lesson in patience for others to walk the train. 

Day time trips are pleasant and worth a ride. To fully understand the experience though, you need to take the train at night. Why? The train is literally lit up like a Christmas tree with LEDs draping both the locomotive, and cars. Inside, the lights are dimmed once travel begins and the LEDs draped along the sides of the interior and exterior and across the ceiling of the cars create a dim, colorful atmosphere complimented by the lights of the South Waterfront out the window. It’s nearly impossible to appreciate these lights to the same degree by day, and the sun sets so early that these night time trips can be made relatively early in the evening, and get the little ones home in time for bed. Or stay up, that works too. The trains only run on weekends. After all, it’s not every day you get to ride a steam train in Portland. -KP

(For more details, the Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation has a website of their own, as well as one for the Holiday Express)

When Light Becomes Art...

With the end of the holiday season, America’s odd obsession with colored lights largely disappears. They seem to be there when we need them, arriving in time for the shortest days of the year to make our nights just a bit brighter. Then they disappear as quickly as they arrived leaving the nights as long and dark as before. We Portlanders  must miss them, or perhaps those nights just become too dark or too long for us to bear. Whatever the reason, a month after the holidays have died down, Portlanders bring light  back to center stage, but in a different way, and with a drastically different feel: steel sculptures filled with crackling wood fires, interactive art installations and odd glowing alien shapes. This is Portland’s Winter Lights Festival.

Tillikum Crossing. Note the green glow on the bridge towers. the city lights, as well as the searchlight and navigation lights add to the festivities, whether intentional or not.

Whether intentional or not, the primary venue for the festival is chosen incredibly well. The stretch of waterfront in which the festival occurs is adjacent to Tri-Met’s Orange Line MAX project, near where the train crosses the Willamette River. The Tilikum Crossing, which carries the MAX, has an array of spotlights that cast colors on the concrete towers based on river conditions, and the MAX station at the end of the bridge is covered by well-lit orange steel cylinders: in a way the area is a light festival year round. In light of the event at hand (no pun intended), even simple things such as flashlights and traffic lights seem to fit in.

The highlight of the festival for me was this fire-breathing dragon. The beast itself was made of polished steel, with a propane gun used to produce it's breath.

The event each February covers several city blocks ranging from OMSI by the water, inland toward the Oregon Rail Heritage Center, and nearly half a mile north along the river. Unfortunately, the event lasts only three nights, and is well-known among enough Portlanders to make navigating the waterfront difficult at best. There is usually just enough room, to stare at a hypnotic backlit-steel wheel, or a set of mushroom-like objects that play musical notes when touched. In more secluded corners, artists set up steel sculptures with bonfires burning inside and a massive stack of firewood to fuel their creations. In some cases it isn’t clear if the object is a sculpture, a vehicle... or some combination of the two. I passed a peculiar glowing blue cylinder, which I assumed to be a static sculpture. I didn’t reconsider this until I later saw it coming down the path towards me!

I spied this sculpture/vehicle a number of times during our visit. The first time I saw it i assumed it to be a stationary exhibit. I was forced to reconsider when it began to move!

Some, like the mushrooms, are interactive and encourage, or even require participation in order to make sense of them.  That’s the purpose of such festivals I feel, to get people involved. Many sculptures are designed to draw the visitor in and in a way, you become part of the art. Near the rail museum, a series of disks was hung from a steel frame. The blue lights turned yellow and played a note when someone walks beneath them. It’s a prompt: an invitation for each of us there to make something out of it, to define it for ourselves. Children run across the stage, tripping all the light sensors and stirring up the notes like sliding hands over a keyboard. In the opposite corner of the stage, a young couple slow danced beneath the disks, in time with the surprisingly coherent song their dance created. People involve themselves with the artwork in other ways too. They take photos, wear bright colored lights, glowing necklaces, or decorate bicycles.

Even the railroad museum decorated. The ceiling was bathed in red, pink and purple light, and the  PA-1 locomotive was covered in stars and stripes!

Not all exhibits required participation: along the Eastbank Esplanade, a series of cocoon-like glowing objects hang from trees, and LED stripes appear to jump up a steel frame built for them. In some cases, getting a definitive meaning out of the artwork is difficult. A projector was set up to turn a concrete building into an active apartment building, with silhouettes in the windows and a peculiar futuristic backdrop.

Across the street, a steel dragon spit flames with a propane jet, it’s gunfire-like breath followed by squeals of startled children. And lest we forget the Tesla coil demonstrations in the railroad museum. I’m one who likes to find definitive meaning in things, but in sculptures like this, that can’t be done. The meaning, as with the glowing disks , would seem to be what you want it to be. It isn’t formal and self defined like oil paintings, it’s begs to be made sense of, while not rejecting any explanation as invalid. What are the people in the windows doing? It’s unlikely anyone will come up with the same details.

This apartment building with it's futuristic urban skyline was located across Water Avenue from OMSI. Visitors gathered on the curb to watch the people inside the building interact with each other. This intricate mural was entirely light--during the day, this is the wall of a business. 

It wasn’t until I was researching for this article that I discovered that we had only seen a portion of the festival. It was the largest portion, but with this realization, it seems I missed out. The festival lasts three nights for a reason. It’s the sort of activity that requires both nights, a map, and a journey around town, via car, paddle boat, or even on foot to fully experience.

If you attended the event, what are your thoughts?