” Portland Int’l Airport

Movie theater opens at Portland Int’l Airport

It took more than three years to make it happen, but on Thursday the marquee lights at the Hollywood movie theater inside Portland International Airport were switched on and a series of short films by Oregon artists began to play.

The mini-cinema has less than 20 seats but, with standing space, has room for more than 40 people to enjoy the hour-long selection of films that will be shown round-the-clock and refreshed quarterly.

Hooray for Hollywood!

 

 

Souvenir Sunday at Portland Int’l Airport

Elves for sale at Portland International Airport

Elves for sale at Portland International Airport

I had the great pleasure of visiting Portland International Airport this week to help Travel Portland welcome the tallest freestanding cuckoo clock in the country to the spot where it will entertainingly tell time till the end of March 2015.

PDX CLOCK

I also had a chance to see, smell and taste some of the Oregon-sourced delicacies offered up at the farmer’s market that pops up twice a week at the airport.

PDX MARKET TABLE

The market is the brainchild of Christian and Annette Joly, who own Caper’s Cafe at the airport, and they were on hand during my visit offering tastes of cheese and freshly sauteed mushrooms as well as intoxicating whiffs of Oregon truffles, from a table also laden with fresh Oregon produce and other tasty treats.

PDX Oregon market

Giant cuckoo clock for Portland Int’l Airport

A giant chainsaw-carved cuckoo clock is helping to keep Portland, Oregon – and its airport – weird.

PDX CLOCK

A project of Travel Portland and created for a winter tourism campaign, this cuckoo clock is 24-feet-tall, nine-and-a-half-feet wide and weighs in at 7000 pounds, making it the largest freestanding cuckoo clock in the United States.

The impossible to ignore clock has taken up residence in the south atrium of Portland International Airport and is scheduled to be there through March, 2015.

The clock is fully functioning and is adorned with chainsaw carvings representing more than a dozen Portland icons and activities, including Sasquatch, Portlandia, Mt. Hood, beer and wine, roses and timber.

sasquatch reading

Portlandia

The main carvings on the clock were all made from a single tree, an Oregon maple, and were all carved by chainsaw artist Chester Armstrong. And every hour on the hour a cuckoo (in this case, a chicken) and several other carved figures parade between two little doors that open at the top of the clock.

CLOCK face

Snack Saturday: new food cart at PDX Airport

PDX FOOD CART LOVE AND WHISKEY

In October, we learned that Portland, Oregon’s food truck craze had finally made it to the airport, with two food carts making their debut and the promise of more to come.

Promises have been kept and a third food cart operator, Love & Whisky, has opened in the pre-security shopping and dining area known as the Oregon Market.

On the menu: gourmet food with savory burgers and pancakes, all “made with loveā€¦ and sometimes a little whisky.”

The food cart program at Portland International Airport is designed to feature a rotating selection, so Love & Whisky will be at PDX through May 2015.

The Stuck at the Airport team is planning to check out the PDX food carts next week when we arrive in town for a holiday shopping adventure that takes advantage of local shops that have branches at the airport, the airport’s street-pricing policy and the fact that there’s no sales tax in Oregon.

While in town, we’re also looking forward to shopping at the art and craft-filled independently-owned stores participating in Portland’s post-Thanksgiving Little Boxes shopping event and prize raffle that takes place in the city’s super-hip neighborhoods.

“The Quest” pulls into Portland Int’l Airport

If you’ve traveled through Albany International Airport sometime over the past few years, then the life-size, foamcore car and trailer exhibit now on Concourse D at Portland International Airport may look familiar.

PDX RAGSDALE CAR INSTALL

Titled “The Quest,” and created by Ken Ragsdale, the work represents “the ideology of exploration and the memory process by which things are remembered.”

PDX RAGSDALE CAR

At PDX, the 16-foot-long station wagon and teardrop travel trailer are suspended 11 feet above the ground and, according to Ragsdale, “illustrate the mechanics of navigation between people and time, and the analysis of memory and reality.”

To learn more about Ragsdale and his work, visit www.kenragsdale.com