It’s officially Spring Break up here in the PNW! Too bad the airlines know all about it. It’s super expensive to catch a flight out of Portland these days, or at least it’s too expensive for our family’s budget. We do have plans to take a family trip to Denver soon but we saved nearly $700 on airline flights when we decided to be flexible with our travel days.
So, on this Official Week of Spring Break, we are enjoying a Portland Staycation. I was thinking over the weekend that it would be a lot of fun to take the kids into the city + do a few food tours: ice cream, doughnut, bakery, hot dog… I wanted to stop in at some popular spots around the city + feast on what only Portland can offer us.
For absolutely no reason at all, I thought we’d start with an ice cream tour. After a quick online search, I found out that “tour” was the wrong word + “crawl” was far more popular for such a thing. (Here I was, thinking I had a new idea. Nope.) All that was left to do was to narrow down the number of ice cream shops I intended to visit, keeping in mind that I didn’t want to make my 7yo + 4yo sick in the process. The location of each of the ice cream shops came into play as well. I didn’t want to have to do too much driving back + forth over the Willamette River.
As it turns out, Southeast Portland was created with Ice Cream Crawls in mind. I found five local ice cream shops within 7.5 miles from each other. Perfect. To make it more fun, I thought we could rate each of the Ice Cream Shops to see if we could agree upon a family favorite, so I designed an Ice Cream Crawl Scorecard. I also made a cute little Ice Cream Crawl Map for us to follow. The kids really loved the inclusion of the map! Turns out, one of the Ice Cream Shops that I had hoped to visit wasn’t open for business on Mondays. I thought about removing it from the map but decided against it, just in case one of you guys might want to include it on your Portland Ice Cream Crawl. =)
Equipped with our maps, scorecards, pens + hungry bellies, we drove into SE Portland. Here are the Ice Cream Shops we visited:
- Cloud City, SE Woodstock Blvd
- Ruby Jewel, SE Hawthorne St
- Salt + Straw, SE Division St
- Fifty Licks, SE Clinton St
- Hurry Back, SE 13th + Lexington (closed on Mondays)
Let’s move on to the photo fun, shall we?!
The results are in. Drumroll, please…Wouldn’t you know it. Each of the three of us chose a different winner.
7yo – Cloud City
33yo – Salt + Straw
4yo – Fifty Licks
This was such a fun afternoon spent in Portland with my Little Ones. I guarantee you’d have a blast doing it in your town too.
P. S. Don’t forget, you can download + print the scorecards + map here!
P. P. S. To save on cost, we ordered kids cones at each location, which I strongly encourage you to do – unless you want a belly ache + an empty wallet.
A short 5-mile drive later + we arrived at the 
Just for a little height reference, my father is 6'2". The fallen redwood they are standing in front of has a trunk base that is over twice my father's height. Some are reported to have bases over 20-feet in diameter. WOW!
Visiting the Redwood Forest has been on my father's bucket list for quite some time now. It made my heart happy to be able to share this experience with him + the rest of my family. I would certainly encourage you to add a trip to the Redwoods to your bucket list as well. They are over 2,000 years old! And they're ginormous, some over 350 feet tall.
Truth is, in the combined six years of our time spent living in the Portland Metro Area, I had never eaten at Voodoo Doughnuts. I had only attempted to once before + the line was just too long for me to wait with my then two-year-old son. Turns out, there was a shop in Downtown Eugene, not too far off of I-5. We stopped in + helped ourselves. (Maybe it's just me, but I like 
